


Preserved

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Series: Preserved [2]
Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Peggy Carter, Cold War, Gen, Korean War, Medical Torture, Missing in Action, POV Bucky Barnes, POV Peggy Carter, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-World War II, Steve Rogers as the Winter Soldier, Super Soldier Serum
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-02
Updated: 2015-01-17
Packaged: 2018-02-27 20:15:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 72,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2705282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the rescue of the 107th, Steve Rogers cashes in all of his favors and makes what deals he can to get Bucky a medical discharge from the Army, sending him home to Brooklyn and far from enemies and curious scientists both. But Steve's war goes on until it ends badly, in an exploding plane over the Black Sea. Captain America is presumed dead, his shield recovered and returned to a grieving America while his body remains undiscovered.</p><p>Seven years later, a new danger is threatening to unbalance the already-roiling Cold War: a Soviet assassin let loose from behind the Iron Curtain. Peggy Carter isn't sure she wants to believe that the assassin is a super-soldier because of what it could mean, but she does know that whoever it is, she'll have to break her promise to keep Bucky Barnes far from danger.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Peggy

### Prologue

"Peggy, you know I trust your judgment, but—"

"Even if the assassin isn’t… even if it’s not him, Howard, it’s someone like him. And we have nothing to counter that save what secrets course through James Barnes’s veins. And if it _is_ him, then we’ll need Barnes all the more.”

"Protecting Barnes was the only thing Steve Rogers ever asked of us, Peg. Going to Barnes now, with _this_? It’ll be a betrayal of the only promise we made to Steve that we’ve been able to keep. Barnes has been home for years. He’s gotten on with his life, got _kids_ for crying out loud. I’m willing to let you burn your candle at both ends for this, but I can’t let you destroy his life for nothing more than rumors and hunches and hopes.”

"It’s not-"

"It _is_. We have no proof. We have a whole lot of coincidences and speculation and the raw grief of a nation that lost a hero and a woman who lost her fella. Don’t look at me like that. I’m not saying that you’re doing this because you got your heart broken. I’m saying that what we have isn’t worth the cost of breaking that promise to Steve. Find me something real, something absolutely true and provable, and I’ll take you to him myself. But until then, let Bucky Barnes be.”

### One

There’d been a car for her to take, but she’d never liked driving in cities and New York was worse than most. Besides, there was something... not right, but perhaps meaningful in taking the Long Island Railroad to Woodside. Following in Barnes’s footsteps, tracing one facet of the life he’d built for himself even as she knew that she was likely coming to destroy it.

But what she understood, what Howard did not, was that such destruction would not be entirely unwelcome and it would not be entirely by her own hands. Bucky Barnes had been swinging a hammer at the foundations of his post-war life even as he’d been building it.

Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes had been honorably discharged from the US Army four months after his rescue from the HYDRA work camp. He’d been sent home earlier than that on a medical chit, but there hadn’t been too much trouble convincing the War Department that Sergeant Barnes’s year-plus of service, including weeks as a POW in extremis, had been a more than sufficient contribution to the war effort. He’d been given a medal and a handshake and returned to the grateful bosom of his family under the watchful eye of Steve Rogers, who had quietly engineered the whole thing.

Steve had been willing to bear the burden of Barnes’s resentment -- of course Barnes had realized what had happened, just as he’d realized that there was nothing he could do about it. But Steve hadn’t anticipated what his death would do to the man who’d spent two-thirds of his life protecting him but had been thousands of miles away on the day he’d been needed most.

On the face of it, Barnes was a glowing example of a returned soldier. He had gone home to his family in Brooklyn and followed his father's footsteps and become a conductor on the commuter railroad. He had married, moved to Queens, and was the father of two young children. He was well-liked at work and in the neighborhood, didn’t drink too much, didn’t hurt his wife, showed up on time to work in good humor. He also showed up regularly at the cemetery where a small headstone was tucked next to Joseph and Sarah Rogers's and had angry, tear-filled, one-sided arguments with the best friend he’d never forgiven and never stopped missing.

The first time Peggy had watched him from a distance, the grief and pain and guilt evident even without seeing his face, she’d left with tears in her eyes, her own pain renewed. The second time, she’d come away sure that Barnes would help them and they wouldn’t even have to ask nicely.

She still planned to ask nicely. It would likely be the only kindness she could offer.

Steve had been in Johann Schmidt's plane when it had gone down over the Black Sea seven years ago. It had been flying southeast from the HYDRA base, but they hadn't known where Schmidt had been looking to escape to and, if Steve had found out, the mystery had died with him. Or was presumed to have died with him, but after seven years of waiting and hoping that Steve had somehow either escaped from the plane or survived the crash, there was little to challenge that presumption. The Russians had found the plane inside a month and had returned Captain America's shield to President Truman at Potsdam with great solemnity and fanfare. That was all they had of Steve, however; the destruction of the crash had been total and there had been no intact bodies recovered, just parts and if none of them had obviously been Steve's, that did not provide either proof of life or its opposite. Schmidt's death had been confirmed with gruesome photographs of his head and upper torso, jaggedly torn away from the rest of him, which was still unrecovered. Steve, however, was lost, in the truest sense of the word, and while the nation and the world had grieved the death of Captain America and moved on, those who missed Steve Rogers had been left in a purgatory with little hope of escape.

Peggy wasn't waiting for him anymore, hadn't been for years, but that didn't change the fact that she'd loved him and he'd gone and not returned to her. Their time together had been measured in quality, not quantity, but it had left her with high standards that none of her subsequent suitors had ever quite met. And, occasionally, it left her doing double-takes at the backs of tall, blond men who might've looked like him in passing. A habit she'd always chastised herself for, but now might possibly have the germ of something besides wishful (and wistful) thinking to it.

Hence the trip to Queens.

She was under no illusion that her visit to Barnes would be welcome; she was a reminder of what the cost of his new life had been and who had paid for it. Barnes didn't blame her for making the offer; he knew as well as she did that the idea had been Steve's from the start. But he blamed her for accepting it, for aiding and abetting Steve in his rashness, and that had been before the final consequences of those actions had been revealed. What he'd do now, when she showed up out of his painful past to tell him that the protection Steve had paid so dearly for was now used up, well that would be seen. She wasn't going to tell him that Steve might be alive, let alone in what circumstances; she had promised Howard that and would have kept that secret even without promising. But what she was going to tell him would be enough to cause damage.

The walk from the railroad station was short and initially quite noisy with the elevated subway rattling overhead and the streets full of shoppers and cars. It was a working class neighborhood, but a pleasant one that quickly became residential once the noise from the El faded somewhat, and was mostly populated by Irish and German immigrants judging by the conversations she heard as she walked. Barnes had married an Irish girl not too far off the boat and it would seem that they’d set up house where she could hear familiar accents.

The Barnes home was on a quiet street, a modest two-story thing with pale green siding and a tiny front yard and a concrete walk currently obstructed by a red tricycle turned on its side. But only temporarily as it was righted and then lifted up by Barnes himself, holding a toddler in the other arm. He looked both completely different and fundamentally unchanged from when last she'd seen him up close and not skulking about in cemeteries; he'd lost the pale exhaustion of the torture victim she'd first met in 1943, but still had a softness of youth about his features that most men had worn away by thirty-five. If anything, he looked younger now than he had back then.

“Judy, come put your bike away or you’re not going to be allowed to ride it tomorrow,” he called toward the rear of the house as he carried the tricycle to the corner of the small lawn and deposited it there. He made sure it wouldn’t roll before turning around and that’s when he saw Peggy on the sidewalk and froze.

"I’m sorry for dropping by unannounced," she began, putting on her best smile. It did not fool Barnes, although the little boy in his arms returned it charmingly. "There’s-"

"Did you find him?" It came out hoarse and full of dread.

She felt her smile falter and the warning burn of tears because his desperation brought forth her own that she'd worked so hard to bury, but she fought for her composure and won. “That’s a complicated question.”

"How complicated a question is it?" he asked sharply. The toddler in his arms, possibly sensing the tension, started to wiggle and fret and Barnes kissed his forehead absently to still him. "You found some sign of him or you didn’t."

Peggy tilted her head a little because Barnes had to know there were more options than that, even if he couldn’t imagine the possibility they were facing. He’d seen too much during his time at war to think it so simple and she’d bet her best pistol on him having spent more than a few moments over the last seven years wondering what else could have happened since Steve’s plane had gone down.

His loud sigh was answer enough, but the little flare of fear in his eyes perhaps said more than he had intended and she did him the favor of pretending to have missed it.

"Bucky, did you want to—" Maura Barnes, black-haired, blue-eyed, and well into another pregnancy, paused as she came around the side of the house. She looked at Peggy sharply and Peggy recognized a threat assessment when she saw one. She held herself still for presentation; she hadn’t come to seduce Barnes into her bed, but she’d come for him nonetheless and pretending otherwise would do herself no favors. Not when Barnes’s posture was still stiff and he was holding his son more closely than necessary.

"Molly, this is Peggy Carter," Barnes said as he adjusted his grip on the squirming boy turning in his arms to see his mother. "She’s—"

"Steve’s sweetheart," Maura — Molly — finished for him, wiping her hands on her apron. The appraising look grew sharper as she approached even as she smiled. "It’s nice to finally meet you."

Peggy shook the offered hand and murmured the appropriate words. Molly Barnes knew this wasn’t a social call as well as her husband did, but insisted Peggy stay for supper as if it were. She took the boy from his father’s arms and sent her husband in to change; he had lost the cap and coat, but was still in his uniform, albeit looking a little askew as his son had been tugging his tie free of the waistcoat.

"This isn’t about finding Steve, is it," Molly said, not making it a question as she led Peggy up the walk toward the house.

Molly didn’t wait for confirmation or correction, opening the door for Peggy and then crouching to let her flailing son free once the door had closed behind them. “Down ye get, Matty.”

Peggy must have shown some surprise on her face — if the file on James Barnes had included his children’s names, she hadn’t seen it — because Molly chuckled as she stood.

"He wouldn’t let me name the baby Steven," she explained with a fond smile as she watched young Matty stumble down the hallway like a tiny drunken sailor. "Everyone thought that’s what we’d do for the first boy and I’d reconciled myself to it before Bucky’d even asked for my hand. But when the time came, he said that there were too many babies named Steve already. But this one—" she patted her stomach, "—he’ll be Steve."

Peggy didn’t ask how she knew or if her husband did. “Steve would have been honored,” she said instead, handing over her gloves and hat to Molly’s now-free waiting hands.

"Steve would have been embarrassed," Molly replied, turning to place the items on the table by the closet door, and Peggy coughed out a laugh because it was true. "I might be spending more time with his ghost, but I met the man once and I don’t think Bucky was wrong when he said Steve wouldn’t want it."

Steve had met the then-Miss Raney on a trip to New York shortly before the plane had gone down, Peggy remembered. He’d come back to London impressed and relieved, glad that Barnes had found someone to be serious about and hopeful that this new bond would someday allow them to heal the still-strained one between them. But while there had been letters back and forth after that visit, it would be the last time they saw each other and, clearly, that repair had not been completed in time. One more item on the list of unfinished business Steve had left behind.

She fought back a sudden surge of feeling, the sharp-jagged bundle of emotions she didn’t bother to identify anymore beyond associating them with missing Steve. “He wouldn’t want it for himself,” she agreed, glad her voice betrayed nothing. “And if he were here, he’d fight you over it. But he’d want Bucky to be at peace and if honoring him by naming a son after him brought that, then he’d grit his teeth and bear it with a smile.”

"Aye," Molly agreed. "The baby will help, but there’s not going to be peace until Steve comes home, one way or the other. And you didn’t come here to say that he had."

The sound of Barnes’s footsteps coming closer to the stairs they still stood near forestalled any reply Peggy might have had. Instead, she followed Molly into the living room, an orderly but comfortable space currently winning the war between tidiness and family life despite the presence of young Judy, who was exhorted to clear up the conference of dolls spread across the floor before her brother could grab them and then go retrieve her tricycle as her Da had asked.

Barnes, now in a collared shirt and trousers, appeared as Judy departed with her mother, cocking an eyebrow and smiling at his son, who’d maneuvered himself into what was undoubtedly his father’s chair and was carrying on a mostly nonsensical conversation with a large toy cowboy. Barnes looked less apprehensive than he had outside, but Peggy knew better than to confuse that with being at ease.

He offered her a drink and her choice of seating; she declined on the first and took a spot on the couch for the second. She’d gotten used to world-changing business over cocktails with Howard, but in James Barnes’s world, drinks were offered to guests and, despite her invitation to supper, she was not one.

"Should I be getting myself a drink?" he asked after Peggy had settled herself. He had followed her, sitting down in the chair nearest to her.

"Would it do you any good?" Peggy asked, figuring it was as good an opening as any. Barnes wanted to know why she was here, after all.

The fear returned to his eyes and she regretted it for a moment, but she’d come here knowing that her arrival would be a wrecking ball against the careful building of lies and denial Barnes had constructed since his discharge.

He sat back heavily, taking a deep breath as he did so and letting it out slowly, eyes on his son before looking up sharply at Peggy. “Enough will.”

They’d known almost immediately that Barnes had been a medical test subject for Zola and for Schmidt and for what purpose those tests had been. And just as immediately, Steve had asked them to make sure nothing came of it. ‘Asked’ was the wrong word — demanded. For all of his naivete, Steve had recognized the power that had come with being Captain America even when Captain America had just been a USO star. And so he’d understood with remarkable clarity what he possessed in the wake of his one-man raid that had netted the Allies hundreds of POWs and intelligence and technology they’d never dreamed of possessing. He’d understood it — and then offered it up in return for Sergeant James Barnes’s freedom.

The deal, such as it was, had been simple. In exchange for Steve indenturing himself to the SSR instead of joining a front-line infantry unit as he could have done, Barnes would go through a full physical exam complete with any and all sample provision, and the results would go into the system without a name. This way, the scientists could see how close HYDRA had been to recreating Erskine’s serum, but there would be no way to trace the samples back to Barnes and thus no way to turn him into a test subject for the Allies. Howard had handled it personally, although Peggy had done most of the behind-the-scenes work to lay down the false trail away from Barnes. Who in turn would go home to Brooklyn, never to be bothered again. They’d lived up to their side of the bargain, Steve had lived up to his, and Barnes had never forgiven anyone for it.

"Why now?" Barnes asked and she could hear the resignation and the anger underneath. "Why now and not then?"

She didn’t know if ‘then’ meant Steve’s death or his own return from captivity. “You know why not then,” she replied, since the answer was the same for both. “Why now… that’s where it gets complicated.”

He looked at her sharply, eyes wide in realization. “You didn’t find Steve. You found someone else. Another one.”

He leaned back in his seat, hand scrubbing his face, eyes everywhere but on her until they found his son, still chattering away to the cowboy doll almost as big as he was. Young Matty looked up and smiled at his father, holding up the doll. "Hungry."

"Why don't you take Tom to ask your Ma when dinner's going to be, hunh?" Barnes suggested, gesturing with a tilt of his head toward the rear of the house, the general direction of the kitchen.

They waited for Matty to climb down from the chair and take his doll out of the room before turning back to each other.

"Three months ago, a brigadier general on the USEUCOM staff was found murdered in the gents at a restaurant in Stuttgart," she began in a quiet voice. "It was a crime of extraordinary brutality, the neck broken so thoroughly that the head was twisted fully about face."

She waited for the meaning to penetrate, seeing in Barnes's expression when he understood that this was a feat that would have required superhuman strength.

"Our investigations have revealed at least two other assassinations that were likely committed by the same assailant," she went on. "I'll spare you the details save for that they, too, required extraordinary strength either in the commission or the escape or both."

The SIS officer in Berlin had been slaughtered like a wild animal on the plain, except it had been high up in an apartment block and the murderer had seemingly climbed up fifteen stories on the outside of the building -- no fire escape to use, just handholds in the concrete -- rather than traverse the always-occupied hallways. The UN official and the lady not his wife had been found in a hotel in Paris with their heads and hearts in no proximity to the rest of them. Peggy had seen the photos and had been one of the only ones not to vomit after, although she had admittedly skipped lunch. It wasn't just the extreme gore that had brought the cases to SHIELD's attention, but the method: no tool marks on the bones, nothing else the forensics people could discern. The bodies had been torn apart with bare hands.

"The killer was sent by the Soviets, the killings themselves messages to more than just us," Peggy continued. "He has been active for at least five years, although this is the first time he's been tasked outside the Iron Curtain. Prior to our general's 'accident' in Stuttgart, he had been used by Moscow Center as a kind of internal control to ensure obedience. As a result, perhaps, he is something of an urban legend in the Soviet sphere of influence, where he has earned the sobriquet 'The American."

She had Barnes's attention now, as if she hadn't before. He sat up, face pale.

"The American," he repeated in barely a whisper. "You don't--"

"We have no idea," she cut him off before he could ask if The American could be Steve. "Moscow is using him to terrify and it makes sense that they're calling him that the same way people on our side see communist bogeymen everywhere. We don't have a description, but there's a chance he simply doesn't have Slavic features or someone saw him in blue jeans. Or it could be nothing to do with what he looks like. It could simply be that anyone displaying superhuman strength is going to be called after the most famous of the type."

She didn't know if Barnes looked disappointed or relieved, but she knew he didn't look convinced.

"Our source in Moscow is aware of the... possibility of who it could be," she said carefully, not wanting to get into the details of who exactly they had reporting from Moscow. Not just for security concerns, but also because Barnes had had little love and less respect for Izzy Goldman even before Steve's death, let alone Goldman's subsequent defection to Moscow, and would not consider any word of his worth the paper it had been printed on. "He--"

"It could be _Steve_ ," Barnes interrupted her. "You can say his name. Or can you?"

The hard look in his eyes startled her a little.

"It could be Steve," she replied, biting back her own anger. How dare he doubt her own pain, her own loyalty to Steve. He wasn't the only one who had loved him and lost him and he hadn't been left alone when Steve had died. "But it could also be another American. You weren't the only one to survive, just the only one we awarded as a prize."

Barnes flinched as if struck and she immediately regretted what she'd done. "I'm sorry," she said, looking up and watching his face until he opened his eyes and returned her gaze. "That was uncalled for, untrue, and unbecoming of me."

Barnes chuffed out a humorless laugh. "Not untrue and probably called for," he said quietly, a rueful smile playing at the edge of his mouth. "You miss him, too. You're just better at hiding it than I am."

She gave him a small smile in return. "I have had much more need to."

A shriek of a child's laughter from the rear of the house filled the silence between them.

Peggy took a deep breath before speaking again. "The Soviets took their share of HYDRA scientists East, just as we've overlooked the crimes of a few for what we hope will be the betterment of the many. We don't think anyone they have is capable of recreating Zola's and Schmidt's work, let alone Erskine's, but we don't know for sure."

Zola was mostly dismissive of the names presented to him as being under Soviet control, at least with respect to those involved with the super-soldier serum. He thought more highly of their selection of physicists and aeronautical engineers.

Barnes nodded once, hand over his mouth before taking it away so he could speak. "And I'm not the only one."

"Probably not," Peggy agreed gently, careful not to let any pity into her words. "But there can't have been very many. The problem is that you might have been the only one we rescued. The overlap between the other... _candidates_ and the MIA/KIA lists is nearly total. There might have been more survivors, but it would have been easy to make them disappear."

Just among those Steve had rescued along with Barnes, they'd seen how incomplete the reportage could be. The prisoners had seen men taken away and most of them had been identified, but some had not been -- they'd been from a different unit or a different country and nobody had known their names. There'd been a burial detail from among the prisoners that had been able to identify most of those killed by Zola and Schmidt during their experiments, but not all of them and for the same reasons -- or because the bodies had been too damaged to identify. The list of who'd been taken from the prisoner pens and the list of who'd been buried did not match up entirely, even accounting for the John Does. There had been eight men who'd been taken from the pens and not turned up either as a corpse or among those Steve had brought back. A few of them might have died in the prisoner revolt, one or two might have been among the unidentifiable corpses buried by the detail. But one -- or eight -- might have been moved to a different HYDRA facility before Steve had shown up. They'd asked Zola and he'd said no, but Peggy wasn't sure if he was telling the truth. He lied to them sometimes, usually for a purpose and occasionally for his own amusement, and if he was lying about this, then she thought it would be the former.

"So what do you need from me?" Barnes asked, wary but also curious. "I don't really talk to anyone I served with except for a couple of the guys who're from Brooklyn and, even then, I don't really see them anymore except maybe on the street when I go down to visit my folks."

She gave him an apologetic smile and she saw his face fall. "We would like to update the files of Patient X."

Back in '43, when they'd been fulfilling the terms of Steve's bargain (his deal with the devil, as Barnes had put it), Barnes had been put through a battery of tests to acquire blood and other samples needed or wanted to determine HYDRA's approach to recreating the super-soldier serum. The results had gone to the scientists with the file heading Patient X, no name anywhere on anything as per Steve's demands. The only people who'd known that Patient X was Sergeant James Barnes were Barnes himself, Steve, Howard, Chester Phillips, and herself. The tests had been done in DC, far from the battlefield and the story of why Captain America had parachuted behind enemy lines, and none of the scientists had so much as asked Barnes for his name.

"The working theory is that if The American is another wartime survivor," she went on when he said nothing, "then his situation is probably similar to yours and the effects of the passage of time, if any, would be similar as well. Also, there are tests that either weren't available in '43 or were not administered at the time that might prove helpful in profiling The American's capacity."

They knew what Steve had been able to do; he'd endured an exhaustive battery of tests before they'd turned him over to the USO and then they'd had almost two years of battlefield reportage on top of that. They had little to no idea of what Barnes or any other HYDRA test subject was capable of and the thought was that these men -- this man, until they could find another -- would be a closer match to whatever the Soviets had produced either on their own or with HYDRA assistance or, God forbid, if they'd found Steve's remains and tried to reverse engineer. That the Soviets had found Steve's body (or a part of it) seemed less than likely but more than possible, but it would do them only so much good -- Erskine's own assistants had had full access to all of Steve for years and done nothing with it. If the Soviets had gotten themselves another true super-soldier, they wouldn't be hiding his face.

Barnes exhaled loudly. "Am I being asked or ordered?"

It was both an unfair question as well as a legitimate one and she could take no offense in the asking of it.

"It's a request," she answered. "A plea, to be honest, and one I do not make lightly. I am not only disrupting your life and asking you to revisit your worst nightmares, but I am also breaking a promise made to Steve that was meant to stand forever."

It was a request, but how long it would remain a request if Barnes said no, she couldn't say. SHIELD needed to make progress on this matter and if no other avenues of inquiry opened up, they would have to revisit this one because it had promise, however theoretical some if seemed to be.

She suspected Barnes understood that.

"How much time do I have to give you an answer?" he asked, standing up a moment before she could hear the rhythm of little feet down the hallway from kitchen toward the living room. He took a deep breath and she saw the transformation of Bucky Barnes from shocked former POW to good-natured family man, the ghosts of horrors past leaving his eyes in favor of a charming smile as he turned to catch Judy as she sped into the room and threw herself at her father with full expectation that he'd always be there to catch her.

"Ma says that dinner's ready and you should bring Miss Carter," Judy announced from the comfortable perch of her father's arms.

Barnes kissed his daughter's forehead before setting her down. "Go wash your hands. We'll be there in a moment."

He watched her go, shooing her along when she paused by the entryway to see if they were following, and Peggy stood, which seemed to be enough forward progress for Judy to decide her mission a success.

"Wash your hands," Barnes called after her.

"They're not dirty!" was the indignant reply, but Peggy could hear Molly wade in with her objection and Barnes turned back to her. Waiting for an answer still.

"You can sleep on it," she said. "But an answer, sooner than later, would be kind."

The look he gave her made it clear that kindness had nothing to do with it on either of their parts, but then he gestured graciously for her to precede him out of the living room.

Dinner was pleasant, surprisingly so, and less strained than it could have been or, perhaps, should have been. The children were both balm and distraction, Matty surprisingly well-behaved (and well-distracted by a high-chair tray loaded with both food and toys) while Judy was curious with the guilelessness of youth about their guest. Both her parents and Peggy were inclined to let a little impudence go if it forestalled any awkward questions or answers. Peggy told Judy that she worked for the government and mostly wrote a lot of reports, which was boring, but she also got to travel a lot, which was not. Peggy had apparently been explained to Judy as the girlfriend of the Uncle Steve she'd never met and, when Judy asked her if she'd loved Steve, she'd replied honestly with "very much." Molly had then gracefully steered the topic back to less sensitive ground by telling Judy that Peggy had been to Paris, which Judy had just read a book about and thus had many questions.

It was a pleasant meal, Barnes having recovered enough to be an involved host and father and Molly was an able cook, but it was also wistful and a little painful for reasons completely unrelated to the grenade she'd just tossed into this family's contented life. She'd had ten years to wonder what life would be and then would have been like had Steve survived the war, whether she would have followed him back to New York or whether they might have set up shop in London or DC or somewhere else. They'd have been together, that she'd known with absolute certainty, although the details of what that new combined life would have been like changed as did her dreams. Steve had had his expectations of marriage, to be sure, but he'd also been raised by a woman who'd worked all her life (by necessity, granted) and he'd respected Peggy's desire to be involved in the world outside the home. And while they'd both wanted children, she didn't think it was just her wishful dreams that he'd have been willing to find alternatives to her giving everything up to stay at home with them. Molly Barnes seemed perfectly content with her life as she'd built it, but it wasn't for Peggy and Steve had known that. But Steve-and-Bucky would still have been Steve-and-Bucky and so she and Steve would have come over to dinner at this house, maybe with their own children, and she would not have been an exotic stranger to young Judy. Instead of Miss Carter, she'd have been Aunt Peggy. Instead of bringing the pain of bad memories, she'd have brought a cake.

Judging from the kindness in Molly's eyes despite the protectiveness of her husband and her family, Peggy suspected she wasn't the only one wondering 'what if' at the table.

After coffee (or milk, in the children's case) and a pie that Molly apologized for not being baked for the occasion, the children were dismissed from the table with permission to turn on the television because it was Thursday and _The Lone Ranger_ was on. Molly and Barnes had the kind of silent conversation that came with familiarity and Peggy pretended to straighten her skirt in her lap.

"I'm going to go get started on the washing-up," Molly announced as she stood up with some effort.

"Let me help, please," Peggy said, standing as well. Barnes rose automatically when she did.

"You're a guest," Molly replied, but then grinned slyly. "Also, the washing-up is when the kitchen is absolutely free of little -- and not so little -- hands pulling on my apron strings. I enjoy the peace of it."

Barnes smiled at his wife, fond and amused both. "We'll help you bring the dishes in, then leave you be."

Before the table was completely clear, however, shouting and crying could be heard from the living room and Barnes made a wry face before excusing himself to deal with it. Peggy could hear his voice, the tone authoritative but not harsh, if not the words themselves as she carried glasses back into the kitchen.

"Well that took longer than I thought it might," Molly said, looking at the clock when Peggy explained her husband's absence from the ferry brigade. "Matty'll be trying to be a cowboy and his sister is never eager to be either the villain or the sidekick. Thursdays are a routine here."

Peggy smiled and turned to go back to get the next load, then paused and turned back. "I'm sorry, for what it's worth. For my visit here to be... what it is."

Whether she meant it instead of what could have been or instead of it not happening at all, she left up to Molly. She wasn't sure of the answer herself.

Molly nodded. "For what it's worth, so am I."

When she returned to the dining room, Barnes was there collecting stray silverware and serving pieces. "Peace on the high plains, at least until the next commercial break."

She smiled, then sobered. "I should take my leave. I've asked what I came to ask and you have a routine here that is probably best not to interrupt."

Barnes didn't try to dissuade her. "Did you drive?"

"I took the train," she replied. "A fine ride it was. I commend your colleagues."

He rolled his eyes and, for a moment, she caught a glimpse of the Bucky Barnes the rest of the world got to see.

"I'm going to walk Peggy back to the station," Barnes told Molly on their final trip back to the kitchen. "You want me to take the little monsters with me?"

Molly shook her head. "It's almost time for baths," she replied. "But you could bring some milk back with you."

Peggy said her goodbyes to Molly and the children as Barnes went upstairs to get his wallet and then they left. They walked without speaking for the first block, the noise of the neighborhood much quieter than earlier, if not quite bucolic enough to forget that this was still New York City.

"If I say yes," Barnes began, "I want something in return. I know you can make me do whatever you want, but that'll take a while. You're not here in an official capacity, at least not really official. You're here because you're hoping a hunch will pay off and then you can make it official after the fact."

They were in the middle of a residential street identical to the one Barnes's home was on and while there was the occasional car passing, the only other pedestrians were a young family on the other sidewalk half a block away. It was safe to not be overheard, but the conversation itself was slipping rapidly into dangerous territory.

"I can't--" Peggy began, but was cut off.

"You can," Barnes said and stopped walking, forcing Peggy to stop as well. "And if you want whatever it is you need from me in a timely fashion, you will. Or else we can wait for you to run it through official channels and get all of the paperwork signed and then you'll have to tie me down like Schmidt did because I will not go quietly." 

There was anger in his voice and determination that made her think of Steve for its steel, but there was also fear and that was why she bit her tongue and did not rise to his baited threats.

"What do you want?" she asked instead, not backing down but not pushing, either. Because he was right -- her need outstripped her authority right now.

"I want my kids left out of this," he said firmly and she blinked because that hadn't even been on her map of possibilities. Something must have shown on her face because he laughed, dark and ugly and bitter. "You hadn't thought about it? Steve did. He was scared of that, did you know? That he'd have kids and they'd be wanted for what was maybe running through their veins. I told him that the two of you could protect 'em from anything, but we both knew it wasn't just the bad guys he had to worry about."

She did reel then, taking a step back. In her fantasies before Steve had died, she'd wondered what their children would look like and whether they'd be breaking their prams or simply just be healthy babies, but she'd never considered them to be tiny targets. It seemed incredibly naive now, under the harsh light of a street lamp and the weight of Barnes's glare, but in her defense, what else were fantasies but naiveté given room to flourish? She'd been a far more innocent woman back then, even if she hadn't felt so at the time.

"So, that's what I want," Barnes continued once her attention was back on him. "I want the same deal you made Steve back in '43: you can have me for whatever you want, but you forget my kids exist no matter what. And I'll just have to pray that you'll keep this promise longer than the one you made him."

She closed her eyes to organize her thoughts without seeing Barnes's eyes on her, although she could still feel them. She took a deep breath, then let it out and opened her eyes again. "I would have promised you that without the threats," she said. "I _will_ promise you that. No matter what. We have made made many compromises for the sake of the greater good and I say 'we' because I have been part of them. But there is no greater good that imperils children. There will be no mention of their existence."

And then she held out her hand and Barnes blinked, surprised at the gesture, before taking it and shaking on their strange agreement.

"So now I own you, Mister Barnes," she said with a touch of lightness to break the weight of the tension between them.

Barnes smiled then and gave her a wink, the charming man once more. "Nah, now you get to fight Molly for me and with all due respect, Agent Carter, my money's on her."

They started walking again in a much more companionable silence. When they reached Roosevelt Avenue, Barnes led her to the ticket area, which was still open, and greeted the seller by name, asking for a ticket using shorthand and thanking the man who refused to take his money in return. He then guided her to the correct platform and to a spot that he explained would leave her next to the staircase upon arrival at Penn Station. There were other passengers waiting to board, but he stayed with her until the train pulled in, at which point the conductor hopped out to say hello to him. It was all done with grace and bonhomie and none of the strain of their conversation en route that she felt a little whiplashed as she took her seat in the car.

The ride was brief and fifteen minutes later, she was hailing a cab up to Howard's mansion. This was not a conversation to be held over the phone, certainly not one connected by a hotel switchboard operator. And it was one, bless Howard, that would go better with booze.

"How did it go?" Howard asked after Jarvis led her into the study and set about refreshing Howard's drink and preparing one for her.

"We got what we wanted," she told him, leaning back in the well-worn club chair. "But it was harder than I'd planned."


	2. Bucky

Bucky heard Judy's protest at the deeply unfair ritual of daily bathing coming from the upstairs bathroom when he got back, but that it was coming from the bathroom and not, say, the hallway or the kitchen or, in one memorable instance, the backyard meant that Molly had the situation well in hand. So he went from the kitchen, putting the milk in the refrigerator, to the living room without interfering. Judy would grow out of her refusal to do anything not on her own terms, his mother had assured him, to which his sister had chimed in that she was sure Sarah Rogers had been told the same thing. His mother had replied that there were worse examples to follow and Bucky already had a good handle on how to deal with that.

He had, right up until he hadn't, of course, and that breaking point had cost them both so very much. Was still costing them a decade later. And he'd just paid some more because someone, somewhere might figure out that his kids might have more in common with Steve Rogers than stubbornness. He'd been watching, afraid and hopeful both, but he'd seen nothing and, more importantly, neither had anyone else. As far as their pediatrician knew, the Barnes children were simply healthy kids blessed with having healthy parents. Maybe that's all it really was, maybe they'd gotten nothing from what had been done to him and just what they should have gotten anyway. He could wonder, but he couldn't take the chance that anyone else would. Which was why Peggy Carter had gotten what she'd come for.

He'd been standing the middle of the room, halfway to his chair, but he found himself walking to the bookcase with the photo albums instead. The blue-gray one, older than the others, and least touched because it was not their wedding album or the pictures of the kids. It had been Steve's, one of two that had come to the Barneses in the boxes with Steve's personal effects after he'd been declared dead in '48. The other, photos of Steve's people Steve'd only partially been able to identify, had gone into the same trunk as the trove of Barnes family photos. But this one covered Steve's own life, pictures of Steve from babyhood through his war years, and it had been brought up to Woodside by his parents and given to Molly, since they'd known Bucky would have objected. And Molly had promptly put it with the others and dared him to do anything about it, knowing that he wouldn't. 

The first photos were labeled in Sarah Rogers's neat hand, Steve as a baby, at his baptism, in short pants holding a hobby horse, looking duly solemn holding schoolbooks. And then Bucky entered the picture, literally, a photo his father had taken of the two of them sitting on a stoop with Steve holding a stickball bat and Bucky with his arm casually around Steve's shoulders; this one had his mother's more flowery hand with the date and place. The rest of the photos were mixed between Steve's school pictures and casual photos through Steve's growth from tow-headed child to manhood. The pace of the photos slowed down as the Thirties drew to a close -- fewer milestones, but also fewer moments ready for the camera. Mrs. Rogers had been sent to the TB hospital in Staten Island, Steve had been working two jobs to go to art school and still keep a roof over his head, and Bucky had been waitering in Manhattan to avoid ending up on the railroad like his old man. The photos from those years tended to be the two of them looking weary and a little surprised, whether by whichever Barnes sibling had been wielding the camera or at how hard adulthood was turning out to be, Bucky couldn't guess. His memories of these captured moments were colored by what came after. 

The last pages were full of promotional photos of Captain America, collected by his mother after she'd found out, along with a couple of photos of Steve out of costume from his time with the USO, taken by one of the showgirls most likely. There was a picture in the Barnes family kitchen of Steve lifting up Bucky's little brother Charlie, both of them laughing because Charlie had been taller and broader than Steve since he'd been fourteen, at least until Steve's "belated growth spurt," as his mother had dryly referred to it on the Cap pictures. There were two pictures of Bucky with Steve. One was from Steve's last visit back to New York before he died, in '45, and they were both smiling for the camera, but Bucky could see the strain between them. The second picture had been taken earlier, but it was later in the album because it had been one found in Steve's effects in London after he'd died; it was from '43, right after they'd gotten back to camp after the rescue of the 107th. They were both oriented toward the camera, but Steve was looking at him with such anguish and such relief that it was painful to see, even now. As for himself, he wasn't really looking at anything, or at least not seeing anything; he looked lost and exhausted and like he'd just walked out of a POW camp. He was filthy and cut and bruised and wearing the tatters of what had been someone else's uniform and his parents had both wept when they'd picked it up off the floor after it had fallen out of one of Steve's sketchbooks. Bucky understood why Steve had kept the photo -- a reminder of why he'd done what he'd done -- but he was also relieved that he hadn't seen it for the first time until years later. 

The protests had ceased upstairs -- Judy having gotten over both having to bathe and doing so with her brother -- and now there was singing punctuated by the occasional yowl for a contested toy. It was a normal evening, the disruption caused by their visitor over and soon to be forgotten. Except not entirely, not for him.

The thought of going through more tests didn't appeal, but he didn't think it frightened him, not anymore. What the Nazis had done to him... it was _over_ , it had been over for almost a decade. He wasn't the shell-shocked man in the picture anymore. There was a new war on to fix the public's eye and if he still dreamed about his own every once in a while, so did every other guy who'd come back. The tests weren't going to tell him -- or the SSR, whatever they were calling themselves now -- anything new. He hadn't noticed any changes, hadn't sprouted wings or started seeing through walls. And the giggles and stampeding feet from the bathroom -- Matty making his nightly post-bath run to his room in diaper-less freedom -- was proof that his biggest fear, that he wouldn't be able to father children, had been unfounded. He didn't know what the SSR was going to ask of him, but he could get through it. He had three -- soon to be four -- reasons upstairs to do so. Marriage and then fatherhood had not only reshaped his priorities, but they'd also reshaped his fears. He wasn't afraid for himself anymore because he didn't live for himself anymore. 

"Daddy!" Judy hollered from the top of the stairwell. "Daddy, will you read with me?"

He closed Steve's album, putting the past away in favor of the future. 

Getting the kids to bed was a two-person job these days, but the adults won in the end. Molly looked worn; she handled her pregnancies well enough that his sisters were jealous, but it had been a long day. He offered to make her tea so she didn't have to go back downstairs and she looked like she was torn between accepting and something else. 

"This isn't you hoping I'll fall asleep before we talk, is it?" 

He didn't want to talk, but he assured her that this was his attempt at being a doting husband and she accepted. She was settled on the bed when he returned with the tea and he sat down at the end on her side and took the hint to rub her feet when she poked at his thigh with her toe. Normally he enjoyed the quiet time he got to spend with her after the kids were in bed and likely to stay there; it was peaceful and unhurried and nothing at all like their pre-kids life. But the weight of what they'd have to discuss bore down on him, squeezing the edges of the calm. 

"What did Peggy want?" Molly finally asked, setting the teacup on the nightstand and wiggling her toes in his hands. 

He didn't look up from what he was doing. "Me."

He heard more than saw her rearrange the fold of the sheets by her hand. Watching and waiting. 

"Does this have to do with what happened to you during the war?" she asked and he did look up then, surprised.

"Don't look all shocked," Molly chided. "I've been sleeping next to you for six years. I know what wakes you up in the night." 

He'd never talked to her about his war; she'd known he'd been in Africa and then in Italy and that he'd gotten captured and that Steve had stormed the camp to free him, all of that was public knowledge and some of it American lore. But he'd never spoken about the rest, not to anyone, not even Steve.

"You don't," he said quietly, squeezing her foot. "You really don't."

He'd have been happy to keep this from her forever, spare her this pain because this would hurt her more than it would him at this point, but fate and Peggy Carter had decided otherwise. He met her eyes and let her see what she wanted to see in his.

She gestured with a tilt of her head for him to join her on the bed at her side. He took her hand once he had, interlacing their fingers. He wanted the connection, but couldn't do this and look at her, so he closed his eyes. 

"The prison camp was a factory, mostly," he began. "But it was also where Schmidt and Zola, the head of HYDRA and his chief scientist, had labs. We didn't know it at the time, but they were trying to reproduce the super-soldier serum. They knew about Steve and Schmidt wanted to do God knows what, make himself an army or whatever it was. So the two of them, Schmidt and Zola, were brewing up cocktails of what they thought Erskine had used and then trying it out on prisoners, seeing what happened. Seeing who survived." 

He heard her inhale sharply in realization and felt her squeeze his hand and he squeezed back. 

"I didn't get taken until near the end," he went on, feeling tears well behind his eyelids because everything was coming back now. All of it, even things he'd never remembered once in the years since. He could smell the bitter tang of the chemicals and hear Zola's voice by his ear and he felt bile rising and swallowed it back down. "I'd had a cold when we'd gotten captured and it turned into pneumonia and they kept me apart from the others until I either got better or I died. I got better, but instead of putting me back on the line, they brought me to Zola so he could experiment on me." 

His voice had broken on the last words, the first time he'd ever said them aloud. He took a deep breath and let it out, then another. Molly pulled their joined hands up to her lips and kissed his and he turned to her, a smile that had nothing to do with happiness on his face. 

"I don't know how long I was with Zola," he said once he could get the words out okay. "I was out of my mind for most of it and wishing I was dead the rest. I knew I _would_ die; nobody came back from Zola's lab. Nobody. Zola just kept using each man up until whatever he tried next killed them. I knew what was going to happen. I just didn't want to die screaming like some of the others did."

He squeezed her hand in his and used the other to wipe away tears. He could still hear the screaming, could still hear _himself_ screaming; it was usually what woke him up from his nightmares when he dreamed about the war. 

"I wasn't in a prison cell when Steve found me, like it says in the story," he continued. "I was strapped down in Zola's lab, out of my head with the drugs. If Steve hadn't seen where Zola had come from, if he hadn't been curious about what Zola might've left behind, I'd have died there when the place blew. Nobody knew where I was, nobody thought I was still alive."

He shook his head, one more tiny miracle on a day with so many. Steve had been trailing them like comets that day, everything about him full of magic and improbable success. 

"I thought Steve was a fever dream, the angel of death or something," he chuckled, bemused even now. He'd heard the explosions, but had still been floating on whatever Zola had given him and he'd been barely lucid enough to be impressed with how peacefully he was taking his imminent death. "He was supposed to be in DC drawing propaganda posters, not in a HYDRA base looking like, well, Captain America. There was a lot there that looked like a fever dream." 

He shuddered at the memory of Schmidt pulling off his face to reveal the red skull beneath. 

"Once we got out of the camp, we still had to get back down to Allied lines," he said as he turned Molly's hand over in his, rubbing her thumb with his own, the gesture soothing to him. "I wasn't in any shape to march the first day, but by the second, I didn't have to be littered anymore. By the third, I was keeping up just fine. We got back to Steve's camp on the eighth day. It didn't take the SSR people too long to realize that I was 'special' and why. It didn't take Steve any time to realize what that would mean. 

"Steve didn't sell himself to the SSR to get me away from the fighting. Or not just. He did it to get me away from the SSR." 

He held up their hands so he could display the inside of his wrist and the light blue veins that were visible there, if not the blood that flowed through them. "Peggy Carter was here to tell me that she -- they -- weren't going to honor the deal anymore. They've remembered what they promised Steve they'd forget. They want to see what Zola did to me. What he turned me into."

Peggy had phrased it more nicely, but that's what she'd meant. In order to understand The American, they wanted to study the monster they already had on a leash. See if he was capable of turning a man's head clean around, but whether she meant if he could or he would, well, that was a distinction that might not have a difference. And if they decided no, he'd be powerless to change their minds.

Molly turned their hands back over so his was on top and his wedding ring reflected the light from her nightstand. He hadn't wanted one because he didn't wear jewelry; his father didn't wear one, nor did many of friends and colleagues, but Molly had felt strongly about it and he'd relented. Molly'd been right, as usual, and every time he saw it, even out of the corner of his eye while waving his cap to signal all clear to close the train doors at the station stop, it made him think of her. He looked up at her now and she cocked an eyebrow to tell him she knew what she'd done. 

"Zola didn't turn you into anything," she told him firmly. "Whatever else he did to you, and I want to kill him slowly for it, that was beyond his power. He changed you, but only into someone who'd felt pain beyond what any good man should endure. And a good man is what you are, James Buchanan Barnes, no more and no less, and I am in a position to judge."

He smiled at her, genuine and, he hoped, full of love. "Thank you," he said, even though they both knew that wouldn't be enough if the government came calling.

"What did you tell Peggy, then?" Molly prompted as the companionable silence stretched. They could hear a car drive past, someone from not around here because they would have known to slow down before hitting the pothole in front of the Flannery house; Bucky winced more at the sound of the suspension recovering than the question.

"I told her she was going to have to make me the same deal she made Steve," he answered, looking down at his free hand in his lap. "I'll do what she wants in exchange for a promise to forget."

He waited for Molly to realize what he'd done. He didn't think she'd be angry with him, not for trying to protect their children. He hoped she wouldn't be angry at him later on, though, once she realized that he'd put them in danger in the first place.

Molly untangled her fingers from his and he held his breath for a second, wondering if she'd already gotten to that point. But then she sighed and brought her now-free hand to his cheek, turning his face to look at her. "You're a fool and it's a good thing I already knew that because we've been married too long for me to be able to return you for a cleverer model," she said softly, pulling him in for a gentle kiss. "Did you lock up downstairs?"

By the time he took care of the locking-up and checking in on the kids (Matty could scream like an air-raid siren if his toy lion had fallen out of his crib during the night) and his own care, Molly had turned off her lamp and gotten herself settled into the pillow fortress she built every night to support her stomach. He wasn't sure if she was asleep, but he moved around quietly just in case. He wasn't sure he'd be able to sleep and if he did, whether it would be without nightmares, but he had to put in a good faith effort; he was on the Ronkonkoma run early tomorrow.

"D'ye think you'll forgive Steve now?" Molly asked softly in the dark.

"Maybe," he answered. Which was as good as a yes as far as Steve ever went, but he wasn't ready to concede it just yet.

* * *

"Did you bring Steve here the first time, too?" Bucky asked as Peggy drove them through the gates of Camp Lehigh, past the better-armed-than-MPs guards and along a tree-lined road. The Army had pulled up stakes but not formally decommissioned the place, simply choosing not to turn it into Fort Lehigh and letting the SSR -- SHIELD -- rent it out for a fee. 

It wasn't meant as irony that they were testing him here, where Steve had been selected for Project Rebirth and where, after he'd been transformed, they'd brought him for his own testing. It was simply expedient. 

"Not the first time, no," Peggy answered, speeding up past the first curve and honking for some pedestrians to get out of the way. The SHIELD agents here wore a uniform that looked like regular Army fatigues until you saw the patches; Peggy had already explained that the Army had let SHIELD buy them for cheap because they were issuing new gear to the guys in Korea. 

They drove past a pack of trainees running in formation with rucks on their back, making it seem even more like a regular Army base; no wonder the locals weren't the least bit suspicious. Bucky tried to find comfort in that little bit of familiar-if-he-didn't-squint; he'd been fine when he'd left the house, but he was feeling more than a little apprehensive now that they were here. He'd been told nothing about what was going to happen, just that it would take all day and to not eat anything after dinner the night before. 

"Nobody knows who you really are," Peggy said as she pulled in sharply to the lot attached to a pre-fab building. "The name on the file is James, no indication whether it is a first or last name."

She stopped the car and stepped out and he followed her into the building, which turned out to be kind of false facade, just a set of security checkpoints before an elevator took them underground. The hallways here were wide and well-lit, but the place still felt like a hospital, especially with the white-coated men rushing to and fro and the stink of chemicals and cleaner underneath the fug of cigarette smoke. It was a lot like the HYDRA base, except the signs were in English and there wasn't the overwhelming stink of unwashed prisoners and human waste. He swallowed hard and followed Peggy's purposeful stride down the hall.

He'd admitted to Molly that he didn't really remember the first round of testing in '43. He knew it'd been in DC and he remembered that he'd flown directly from Italy without getting to go to New York first, that before he'd left Italy he'd had a fight with Steve that would have escalated to violence had Steve not used their strength disparity to hold him still. But there was a gap that covered the time from the plane ride to when he had already arrived in Brooklyn. His first memories of being back on US soil were of sitting in his mother's kitchen eating an apple dumpling. He didn't know if it was because he'd just shut down in DC or because he'd been a little hazy around that time in general, but he suspected the former because the rest of that time was pretty clear. How bad it had actually been, he didn't know, but clearly it had been too much. He could only pray that this time, it either wasn't so bad or he could forget it as completely. Maybe they could make him forget. 

There was a staircase on the other side of the door they passed through that led down to what looked like the garage where he brought his car for repairs, except that the equipment was smaller in scale -- for human bodies, not autos. Peggy paused on the steps, looking for someone, giving him a chance to catch up and look around. There was a giant tube in the corner, mounted on metal arms, that looked like something out of the old horror shorts, a vampire coffin for a modern kind of vampire, maybe. It's not like there was any daylight down here.

Peggy found who she was looking for and started walking again, turning left at the foot of the stairs and wending her way around the tables and the men focused on their test tubes and microscopes. Her target turned out to be a fellow in his fifties, maybe, gray hair and glasses and a smile for Peggy that was just short of being a little too appreciative of how she filled out her suit. Bucky couldn't see how Peggy reacted, but he didn't bother to hide that he didn't care for it when the man's attention turned to him. He might not be happy with Peggy coming into his life like a wrecking ball, but she was still Steve's girl. Not that she needed his help; when she spoke to Doctor Wakefield, her voice was frosty enough for even the biggest idiot to notice and Wakefield, it turned out, was no idiot. He was the head honcho around here, which didn't mean he wasn't an idiot, but he stopped treating Peggy like a cigarette girl. Bucky, on the other hand, was still a lab specimen.

Wakefield called over a black guy named Wendell and told him to take Bucky off to get changed and take his vitals and get him fed, what sounded like the basic stuff you'd tell a nurse or an orderly to do. Except that once Bucky -- after a quick look over at Peggy, who nodded -- had been led out of the garage-like main floor and into a side room that looked more like what passed for a doctor's office in the Army, it turned out Wendell the orderly was actually Doctor Clarence Wendell, MD-PhD.

"Seems like overkill," Bucky responded as he changed behind a leather curtain into what was definitely surplus Army PT gear. The curtain was really to shield the doctor during some test and Wendell had told him he'd be getting undressed in front of other people later, but it was an offer of the dignity of privacy on a day when there wasn't going to be any and Bucky appreciated the gesture. "Of course, I never finished college in the first place."

He'd been good enough in high school to be a day student at Brooklyn College and he'd gone for two years, but he had quit after that and gone to work instead. The first year, everyone had been so enthusiastic on Bucky's behalf -- the first Barnes to go to college! -- that it hadn't seemed so bad, but the enthusiasm of others couldn't carry him forever. The classes weren't too hard, just everything else. His parents were still supporting four kids with him in school during the day and he wasn't sure anymore what college would get him for a career. He'd had no designs on being a doctor or a lawyer, didn't want to be a teacher, and didn't have the connections to move into business. His parents had been vehement that his decision shouldn't be based on their finances and they'd been a little disappointed because they'd had dreams of him being a doctor, but it had been his sister Dottie who'd been the first Barnes to graduate college and he'd been glad for her with no regrets. 

"My parents thought I might've been avoiding the 'getting to work' part of the show," Wendell admitted as Bucky emerged from behind the curtain with his clothes in his hands. Wendell gestured toward a set of hooks hanging on the wall and Bucky went over to hang them. "But it got me here, so it was just the right amount of kill."

Bucky thought back to Wakefield snapping his fingers to summon Wendell like a porter and hoped it was as worth it as Wendell seemed to think. 

The exam that Wendell performed was quick and nothing that a regular doctor wouldn't have done and Wendell didn't seem either impressed or surprised by the results until he whacked Bucky on the knee with the hammer and hadn't been prepared for the reaction time or strength. 

"Hunh," he chuffed out. "You got good reflexes all over?" 

Bucky gave him a weak smile. "Kinda why I'm here."

Wendell raised his eyebrows because yeah, he knew that. "Knowing it and seeing it's a different story," he said. "Especially in person. I've seen the footage of Steve Rogers's tests, but that's almost like a movie, you know? Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd did the same kind of stuff on film, too, and there's not much difference watching it on the screen."

It hurt to hear Steve spoken about like a stranger, like a fictional character, and Bucky bit his lip to keep from saying that Steve had been a friend and that seeing that friend suddenly appear twice as large as life and just in the nick of time had been both everything and nothing like a movie. 

"You have Rogers's tests?" he asked instead. He wondered what Steve had looked like during the test, whether he'd been amazed at his own changes or terrified by the camera as he'd always been until the USO had apparently knocked it out of him. The pictures of Steve in the album at home were sometimes laughable in their stiffness; Steve had done okay when caught unawares, but if you'd told him to pose he'd look all wide-eyed and freeze and the result was that he'd look like an escaped prisoner who'd just heard a police siren. Or else his eyes would be closed. The only exceptions had been when he'd been a little drunk or too tired to react quick enough; it was just as well that he'd learned how to pose because Captain America hadn't been able to get drunk and it would've taken much more than exhaustion to dull his reactions. 

"They're really not all that interesting," Wendell replied, going back to the table in the corner and doing something with his back to Bucky. "He was just doing the same things you're going to be doing. We're going to be filming you, too."

Bucky might've said something about that, but then Wendell turned around with a tray with syringes on them and then Bucky couldn't say a word. He hadn't been near a syringe since '43, let alone so many. He inhaled loudly through his nose and let it out just as noisily, settling himself. He'd known this was coming, had been expecting it, and he'd thought himself prepared. But apparently not, or maybe not without some warning.

"Not a fan of needles?" Wendell asked with a smile, amused. "These aren't so bad; they're just to draw blood. The ones they're gonna use later are gonna be much bigger. Sorry."

Wendell was still smiling a little as he reached out to tourniquet Bucky's arm and Bucky wondered who Wendell thought he was if he was making jokes about needles. Wendell could be an asshole who just enjoyed watching someone else's misery, but those kinds of assholes wouldn't have turned their backs as Bucky changed behind a curtain.

The stick of the needle was a split-second of pure horror, but then it was over and Bucky could watch the rest of the blood draw with a dispassionate lack of concern. At least until the third vial was filled and he had to ask just how much more was going to be required. 

"You never met a Negro vampire?" Wendell asked cheerfully, then sobered a little. "This is the last one."

The next bit of fluid collection earned Bucky an entirely different kind of smile from Wendell as he explained what was required. 

"You're kidding," he said flatly as Wendell handed him a small sample cup. "Come on."

"What, you want a bigger cup?" Wendell knew very well this time that Bucky was uncomfortable and his amusement was because of it, not in spite of it or in ignorance of it. "I'll wait outside."

It wasn't the principle of the thing, either the act or its necessity -- church-going Catholic or not, Molly's willingness waned during her pregnancies while his urges did not and this might be the only way to find out if anything had been passed on to their children. But the circumstances were going to make it difficult -- he'd stroked one off in odd or dangerous places before, but not since he'd come back from the war and not since the smell of chemicals and antiseptic and iodine started making his heart beat faster for all the wrong reasons. 

It felt like it took forever to tune out the world enough to even think of touching himself, but when he opened the door afterward, Wendell didn't make a joke and just took the cup for labeling. 

The next stop was X-rays, where Wendell asked if Bucky had kids while he positioned the lead blanket. Bucky nearly answered "two, one more on the way" before remembering where he was and why and what Peggy had promised him and so he said no, not yet. "Well, then you'd best keep that blanket in place in case you change your mind," Wendell warned him before going to disappear behind his own protection. 

The jokes were about glowing in the dark as they moved on to the next stop, which was a break room with coffee and ham-and-cheese sandwiches and grapes. "We needed you to fast for the blood draw, but now you'll need your strength back," Wendell told him as he pulled out a cigarette case. There was another man sitting at a small table in the corner reading as he stirred something in a bowl, ignoring them completely. Wendell let him eat, enjoying his own cigarette, but carried what conversation there was. He didn't ask Bucky about his past or his present, keeping to neutral topics like baseball. Which wasn't all that neutral once Wendell admitted to becoming a bit of a Giants fan since moving to New Jersey -- "hey, Ernie Harwell's who comes in on the radio down here!" -- but they could talk about Kiner and Minoso and how much more tolerable Allie Reynolds would be if he weren't pitching for the Yankees. 

After a pair of sandwiches and a handful of grapes washed down with coffee, Bucky was led on to the next station, which was a dimly lit room with machines to test his vision and hearing. He had very good of both, but he didn't think he was very special there, or at least that what had been done to him made much of a difference -- those senses had made him a good soldier before his capture. But he had no way of knowing because the people who tested him didn't say a word to him that they didn't have to and didn't react at all to the results. 

"Now's when you get to make like a performing monkey," Wendell told him apologetically after he came in to retrieve Bucky. "It's probably the most important part, though."

The hall they entered looked like one of the lecture rooms from his college days with a stage up front with blackboards and stadium seating at the other end with desks and chairs on the different levels. The seating was mostly occupied and Bucky saw Peggy among the audience and felt relieved and then was surprised by that. She gave him a nod that made him feel a little less like the tiger at the zoo, at least until Wakefield took custody of him from Wendell, who disappeared into the crowd, and ordered him to stand in front of the blank white space on the front wall between the blackboards. 

What followed then was almost relaxing in as Bucky was ordered to take off his shirt and stand barefoot in the PT shorts and turn and hold position for the movie camera like a model for a magazine or a prisoner for a police lineup. He was told to jump and stretch and then measured like a prize fighter and weighed again, even though Wendell had had him step on a scale and he'd eaten an hour earlier. It was strange and a little uncomfortable to be on display, but it was also nothing like Zola's lab, just impersonal without being completely dehumanizing. Kind of like basic training had been and if Bucky closed his eyes, he could almost imagine it was back then, full of petty humiliations and nonsensical orders that had an actual purpose he couldn't divine. He'd signed up for more than he'd bargained for then, too. 

The feeling of deja vu from Basic continued once they moved from modeling to dodging projectiles -- rubber pellets fired from a special gun; they moved much slower than bullets but still hurt the couple of times they were aimed center-mass and he'd not been able to avoid them completely. There were no apologies when that happened, which certainly was like Basic had been. From dodging to catching, this time tennis balls from a machine that fired them like mortars and Bucky's palms got numb but he was able to lose himself in the activity, forgetting where he was and why in favor of concentrating on catching each one. It was a little like playing catch with Judy and her pink ball; her enthusiasm outstripped her aim by a healthy margin, although the balls came at him now with a bit more pepper than she was able to put on them. They didn't seem that fast, though, and he was able to catch all of them without breaking a sweat, but when the machine stopped and he looked up and once again saw the faces of the observers and they all looked a little stunned. Even Peggy, which made no sense because she'd seen Steve do all sorts of things with his super-skills. It was uncomfortable and he turned away from them, going over to where a glass of water had been placed for him and draining it. 

When he went back on the stage, Wakefield ordered him over to where a cord-and-pulley weight lift was set up, like you'd see at the arcade down at Coney Island for the strongmen just without the rainbow colors and Wakefield's assistants weren't as leggy, female, or saucily dressed. The only weightlifting Bucky ever did was picking up his kids and applying brute force to broken train doors at work, but he didn't think he embarrassed himself too badly. The circus theme continued through the end of the strength and reflex tests until Wakefield finally had enough and barked out something to his assistants and walked off, the audience stirring to action as he disappeared. Bucky was left waiting on stage, so he put on his shirt and stood there until someone approached him. It wasn't Wendell this time, but a middle-aged man with a limp and, when he opened his mouth, a Polish accent. 

Doctor Greenbaum was a psychiatrist who specialized in cognitive development and explained to him as they walked to yet another room that he would be testing Bucky's memory and analytical skills, how quickly he processed data and how well he retained it. 

"I hope you aren't going to be measuring me up to Rogers," Bucky said as they walked down the hallway. "The serum didn't do anything to his memory."

Steve had always had the memory of an elephant, which had sometimes been great and sometimes been terrible. What _had_ changed by the time Bucky met him as Captain America had been his ability to focus. Steve had been a daydreamer, which hadn't helped either in school or in the schoolyard. He'd concentrate on his art, but everything else he could easily get distracted from. But Captain America had been another story and Bucky honestly didn't know if the serum had done that or simply the war. Not all of the changes in Steve had come out of Erskine's bottles. 

Greenbaum gave him a measuring look and Bucky belatedly realized that he shouldn't have given any indication that he'd known Steve and hoped that that had been a detail that had been in the stuff they'd written about him after the plane had gone down. He needed to be more careful, more mindful. These were all very smart people and not one of them was his friend or even his ally, not even Wendell; they were all interested in him for less-than-good reasons and were being held in check by a flimsy agreement they hadn't signed on to. Greenbaum had been friendly toward him after he'd been treated like a circus monkey and he couldn't respond to that as he had. He'd been away from the battlefield for a long time, but he needed to be back on it now. These people weren't his captors, but they were more dangerous in many ways. 

Greenbaum's room was somehow spare and cluttered at the same time, bookcases around the walls crammed messily with papers and books but his desk and the table to which he led Bucky were clean and organized. The memory tests weren't what he'd thought they'd be -- like the card game, turning over matches -- but instead required him to look at a series of pictures for a few seconds and then answers questions about them, then the process was repeated with lists of numbers and then paragraphs of text. Bucky had never had Steve's gift of perfect recall, but he'd been working for the railroad for almost eight years and, like every other conductor worth his salt, he could look over a picture -- or a car full of passengers -- and remember the important details, same with skimming lists of numbers or train schedules. He cruised through the memory tests. His work skills helped him out with the computational and analytical tests as well. If he could give correct change for an on-board ticket purchase without missing a beat and re-work the schedule in his head to know if they were going to have to ask for the connecting train at Valley Stream to be held up for them while a dozen passengers griped at him for the delay, then sitting in a quiet office adding sums and figuring out which one of Alice, Bob, Carol, or Don had bought the red apple or the green apple wasn't going to be difficult. He couldn't tell if Greenbaum was pleased or disappointed that he wasn't more flustered by the problems placed before him.

It was Peggy who came to collect him from Greenbaum. "How are you holding up?" she asked as they walked back the way they'd came, to the elevator. Her tone was professional more than compassionate, but there was enough humanity to let him know that she wasn't asking for form's sake.

"I think the worst is yet to come," he answered honestly. 

She gave him a smile that was almost kind as they waited for the elevator doors to open. "You're doing much better than last time, if that's any comfort."

He looked at her sharply. Had she been there? He didn't remember her being there, which, granted, he didn't remember anything, but that seemed like something he would recall. "I don't think I could do worse."

She smirked agreement, but gave him nothing more, pulling open the elevator door and gesturing for him to precede her. Her own version of politeness or a none-too-subtle means of reinforcing that he was the damsel in distress and she was the hero this time, he didn't know. 

Upstairs and outside and a jeep was waiting to take them across the camp to a running track, where Bucky did timed sprints and then ran for distance, getting his heart rate checked before and after each time. Then to a shooting range. He'd been an expert shot before his capture with both a pistol and a rifle and he'd been a sniper in Africa, but in theory none of them knew any of that. He'd shot since the war; Charlie was a cop now and once in a while would get Bucky to come to the range for a little sibling rivalry shootout. (Bucky beat him on points every time and he didn't know why Charlie kept it up; their mother said it was a way to build a relationship with the big brother who'd gone to war just when the age difference would have stopped mattering so much and had come home a stranger.) His first few shots weren't what he'd have liked, but then he got the feel and the rest were good. Shooting was relaxing, it always had been. He'd been surprised when he'd first held a gun, how natural and easy it was, but now it was something he took as expected, to fall into the rhythm and see the proper results. He didn't know if this had been planned as a kind of break for him or if it was just coincidence, but he felt calmer as they drove back to the underground bunker and whatever came next after Peggy handed him back over to another someone in a long white coat who didn't bother introducing himself.

It didn't take long for that calm to disappear, however, once they were back down the elevator. He was told to shower and given only a pair of Army issue shorts and a pair of socks to put back on once he was cleaned off, then he was led to what looked like an operating room.

He froze at the doorway, looking around at the machines and the equipment and the steel bed with the restraining straps dangling and the impatient, expectant faces of the doctors who just wanted what Zola and Schmidt had put inside of him. He couldn't breathe for a moment, then he could but not easily. He felt lightheaded and ready to vomit and he wanted to run all the way home to Woodside in his underwear. He wanted a pistol back in his hands, although whether to shoot himself or them, he couldn't have answered in that moment. He couldn't move, couldn't hear what was being said to him, couldn't feel the fingers of the hand pulling him forcefully into the room.

And then everything snapped back into place, his heart stopped hammering and his ears heard voices and he could move his feet because he had to. This was what he'd agreed to, this was what kept these men from Judy and Matty and the baby he knew Molly was going to want to name Steven if it was a boy. This is what he now prayed to God he'd forget once it was over. 

He got on the table, centered himself on the padding, and lay down on his side as commanded; his fingertips felt the grooves on the side of the table that were meant to catch the flowing blood. He concentrated on his breathing -- on breathing at all -- and alternated between closing his eyes to make it all go away and needing to see what was happening. Almost all of which was happening behind him, which didn't help his anxiety. He saw motion by his feet and it turned out to be Wendell, who was not smiling now, was looking a bit queasy, actually, and Bucky chuckled to himself because good, he wasn't the only one. 

His shorts were cut away along his side, exposing his hip and his right butt cheek and he felt the coolness of an alcohol swab and then something else wiped over the area as well. Nobody was talking to him, he didn't know what anyone was doing but that might've been because he hadn't been able to listen when he'd been told, although he suspected a needle was going to be involved because they always cleaned before needles. Zola, who'd been otherwise oblivious to his subjects' filth and stench, would swab before jabbing in a syringe. 

They warned him, at least, that he'd feel a prick of a needle. "It's an anesthetic," he was told. "It will numb the area so we can take the samples without discomfort to you."

"You know I need more than normal, right?" he said in what sounded like a surprisingly calm tone. 

"Yes, Mister James," a voice said from behind him. "We are aware of your accelerated metabolism from your previous exam."

It sounded strange, hearing it like that. He knew that's what it was, but he never thought about it so... scientifically. He didn't get drunk easily and he didn't really gain weight, but that's as far as it went -- he got ribbed a little bit by the guys for eating all the time and not getting a gut. It was nothing too out of the ordinary, not with his skinny parents, and he didn't have to ignore it the way he had to pretend he didn't notice some of the other things. 

The prick of the needle was more than a prick, but it was over quickly and he'd seen the needle approach from the corner of his eye. They left him be for a minute, probably so that whatever they shot him up with could take effect, and Bucky was ready to breathe deeply and try his best to endure the rest without embarrassing himself... until he saw the next needle. It was massive, a comic-book spike of a needle and it was coming at him from his front side, so he could watch it approach, held in the hand of a doctor who was carrying it like a dagger, and he couldn't think of his dignity as he watched, couldn't think of anything as the syringe came closer and without so much as a glance up at his face to see if he was ready, was jabbed in to his hip with enough force that it didn't stop when it hit bone. 

He screamed then, in pain. In terror. He couldn't breathe, couldn't see with his eyes tearing up, and he heard himself screaming but it didn't feel like him because he felt nothing but fiery pain radiating through his body like a shockwave. Like it had in Zola's lab. He reached out to yank it free and felt hands holding him back, not enough force to stop him until it was and he was being pushed down against the table and he fought, fought like he hadn't been able to in Zola's lab. But the response was the same, more bodies holding him down, restraints being strapped over him, more needles pushing more drugs into his veins and it didn't matter, he was stronger than they were, stronger than the drugs, Zola had _made_ him stronger than both. He looked around to see if Zola was watching, smug grin on the tiny bastard's face as he watched to see what his concoctions had wrought, but he couldn't see him, couldn't see anything familiar, and then there was something over his face and he saw nothing. 

He wasn't out completely, he realized, just lax and loose and rubbery and he could still hear voices, angry and surprised and too fuzzy to make out. His German had always sucked anyway. It took effort to open his eyes but he did because the last time he'd felt like this, Steve had come for him. He felt his eyes burn with tears when he just saw a light fixture. He didn't know how long he'd been out, but he knew they were still working on him, doing whatever they wanted, and he couldn't make his limbs move enough to fight them. He moved enough to startle them, though, and he heard someone shout at someone else about why the hell was he still awake. He could feel a weight dragging him down to unconsciousness and all he could do, all he had time to do, was pray that he woke up.

He woke suddenly; he was alert when a moment before he hadn't been. He didn't open his eyes -- Zola's people left you alone, most of the time, if you were out but still breathing. He listened, hoping he could pick out something, as he cataloged his body: he could feel his feet, his legs, his hands, his arms, his back; he knew his head was still attached and only hoped his balls were, too -- Zola had taken those from some of his subjects. His right hip hurt, but nothing else, and he was thirsty but not dangerously so. He didn't hear anything, just a quiet hum he recognized as air flow and the ripple of paper, either moving on the breeze or a page being turned. 

And then he heard a door open and then Johnnie Ray's voice singing in the distance and that didn't fit, Zola had only played Wagner and Strauss, and he knew all in a moment that this wasn't then, wasn't there. He wasn't in the HYDRA factory; he was in New Jersey.

There was the sound of something being put down and footsteps moving away and the door closing, leaving Johnnie Ray to walk his baby back home somewhere else. 

He opened his eyes and saw the operating room, and breathed deeply, letting it out in a gust. A second later, Wendell was standing over him.

"Welcome back," Wendell said, watching him with concern. 

"I'm not gonna hit you," Bucky got out, although it came out raspy and low and raw. 

"Good to know," Wendell replied with a quick smile that disappeared as fast as it had come. He continued to look Bucky over with a professional eye. "Although I'm not sure I'd blame you if you did. How do you feel?" 

Scared. Embarrassed. Angry. Exhausted. Vulnerable. "Been worse."

Wendell chuckled, but he didn't look amused. "I'm a lot less surprised by that answer than I would have been this morning," he said, taking a step back. "Can you sit up? Slowly, slowly."

He held out his hand for Bucky to use to steady himself, but Bucky didn't take it, just moving stiffly -- the dressing at his hip was well-padded. He didn't feel unsteady, or at least like he was about to topple over. He felt unsteady in every other way and arranged the blanket they'd covered him with around his waist and lap like it could protect him the way the X-ray blanket had. 

Once he'd proven himself capable of sitting, Wendell went over to the sink and filled a glass of water, handing it over with the exhortation to drink slowly or it would all come right back up. 

"I know I'm not supposed to ask," Wendell began once the empty glass was handed back over, "but... all they told us is that you were a test subject for one of the attempts to recreate Erskine's serum back in the Forties." He paused, hands moving restlessly over the glass's rim. "Did we do this to you?"

Bucky smiled. He was relieved that Wendell didn't know the answer, that nothing he'd done while he was out of his mind with fear and convinced he'd been back on Zola's table had given his identity away -- he hadn't rattled off his name, rank, and serial number or started begging in German for them to stop. Or maybe Wendell hadn't been there for it, but Bucky suspected that if anyone had left the room, they'd have been called back to hold him down.

"Can't say much for your bedside manner today," he said and Wendell had the good grace to look ashamed. He knew why Wendell was asking and was glad for it -- a little less glory of the science and a little more remembering that they were doing science on _people_ couldn't hurt in a place like this. "But the SSR weren't the only ones trying."

It was all but an admission that he'd been a POW and not a volunteer, but he knew it wouldn't get Wendell any closer to figuring out who he was. The original file of Patient X, to which everything from today would be added, made it clear that he'd been a HYDRA test subject and if Wendell didn't know that now, he would eventually. 

Wendell took a step back and clutched the glass more tightly. 

"I'm sorry," he said, meeting Bucky's gaze. "I'm sorry for what they did and I'm sorry that we acted like it didn't matter. It's in your file, isn't it?"

Bucky shrugged. The important people knew and didn't care because it didn't matter except that it made sample collection more difficult. If it had mattered, he wouldn't be here. 

"The people you work for have their priorities," he said, since "the people you work for are soulless bastards who'd do anything to get ahead in the game" was less useful, if more accurate. 

He slid off the table and on to his feet, happy that his legs held him up without wobbling, once Wendell turned to put the glass down. He didn't want to talk about this anymore because he didn't want Wendell working up the courage to ask why he was here today. 

There was a robe folded up on a tray table and Bucky went to it, shrugging it on and then letting both the blanket and the tattered underwear fall away underneath before belting it tightly. He left those on the tray table. 

"They've canceled the rest of the tests for today," Wendell explained as gestured toward the door and they left the operating room. "Agent Carter'll take you home."

"I made enough of a scene?" Bucky asked, relieved to be finished but disappointed that this wasn't going to be the end of things. 

"Nobody really kept track of how much we used to bring you down," Wendell said as they walked. _Take_ me down, Bucky corrected in his head. "And we need to re-establish your metabolic rate because it's nothing like it was when you were last tested. What you were given should have worked and, clearly, it didn't. The next tests... they hurt, no getting around that. And if we can't minimize that pain, or knock you out entirely if that's best, then it's good to wait until we can. You shouldn't need to go through that again."

Wendell didn't follow him into the room where his clothes were still hanging on their pegs. He could see the starts of bruises on his arms and chest, long ones from the straps and the hands holding him down and small blotches where the needles had gone in. He'd probably best change for bed in the bathroom tonight; Molly was going to be on edge no matter what and seeing him like this wasn't going to be good for her with the baby so close. 

He splashed water on his face before putting on his undershirt and made an effort to straighten his hair with wet fingers once he was dressed, but Peggy still nearly did a double-take when she came to collect him from the break room, where he was waiting by himself with a copy of yesterday's _Times_. She put on her best face, though, and gave him a brisk exhortation to get going so that they could avoid the traffic. 

The ride back to Manhattan was quiet; Peggy drove and he looked out the window until they hit the tunnel. 

"Do you want me to drive you all the way back?" Peggy asked. 

The plan had been for her to drop him off at Penn Station and he'd take the train home from there; it was supposed to have been later and the rush hour traffic would have been murder. 

"Do I look that bad?" he asked by way of reply. 

Peggy made a point of looking him over, all without giving the impression that she'd forgotten about the road in front of them. 

"No, but I'm sure Molly will think otherwise," she finally answered. 

"Train'll still be faster," he said and so she swung south once they cleared the tunnel instead of heading north for the Queensboro Bridge. 

"They'll want to complete the testing," she warned him as she double-parked on Eighth, ignoring the honking of the taxis she was obstructing. "I don't know when it will be, but I'll let you know when I do." 

Bucky nodded, reaching for the door handle. He knew and he'd have to prepare himself for it, but right now, he needed to recover from today and pretend that next time didn't exist. He needed to see his family, see his kids to remind himself of why he'd agreed and why this was so important. He needed time for the bruises to fade, both the ones on his body and the ones on his soul. "But you got what you needed already, right?" 

She made a face that could've meant anything. "I got answers," she said. "Some of them were for questions I had, some were for questions I didn't know I had. I have more. But, yes, this helped tremendously and I thank you for that."

He laughed, low and bitter, as he opened the door. "You don't have to thank people for doing what they had no choice but to do."

He closed the door gently, patting it twice, before turning to go toward the station entrance. He didn't look behind him. 


	3. Peggy

"I can parse out some of it, but I need someone more expert to explain the rest," Peggy had told Howard when she'd gotten a copy of the updated files of Patient X. He'd played down his expertise, but they both knew how involved he'd been in Rebirth even if he hadn't touched the serum. Come back tomorrow, he'd told her. And now here she was, following Jarvis down to the basement where Howard played with his explosive, expensive toys. The smell of cordite and chemicals and tobacco hit her by the fifth step down, the faint strains of Django Reinhardt a step or two later. 

Howard, away from the cameras and the expectations, was... not entirely a different man. She had come to appreciate that about him, to enjoy it, even. He was over-full of ideas and charm both, surprisingly sweet-natured, and mortally wounded by his failures even if they hadn't killed him yet. He was a fighter on a different battlefield than the ones they'd sent so many young men to die on, same as her, and they recognized that in each other. 

He had his back to them when they entered, caught up in the music and the calculations on the blackboard, something to do with a bomb if the diagram was any indication, moving gracefully to the beat and conducting with the chalk without taking his eyes from his work. 

"Hey, sweetheart," he greeted her with a smile after Jarvis has announced her at a volume pitched perfectly to break Howard's concentration without at all appearing to do so. "How's kicks?" 

It was a mostly rhetorical question and he started rooting around on the cluttered table without waiting for her to answer. "He's a lot closer to Rogers than we thought he was," he said without preamble. "Zola and Schmidt must've been almost there."

She looked around for a seat that wasn't covered in piles of paper and, failing that, leaned back against a stone-topped lab table and crossed her arms. "I suppose it stands to reason. Barnes had been the latest subject when he was found, he would have received the most recent formulation."

It might have stood to reason, but not necessarily to experience; Bucky Barnes did not look like a super-soldier. She'd now seen him shirtless and while there was definition to his form, he still could have passed as the 'before' picture to Steve's 'after' in a weight-gain advert if you hadn't known what Steve's actual 'before' had looked like. Barnes looked like his own 'before' pictures, uncannily so for the amount of time having passed. That Barnes was aging more slowly than a normal man had been one of the parts of the report she'd understood and it had been a point at which she'd stopped reading because it had been such a short leap from there to wondering what Steve would have looked like now. Whether he'd have looked the same at thirty-four, the age he would have been now, as he had at twenty-seven? What would he have looked like at forty, at fifty, at eighty? What would it have been like to grow old and wrinkled and shriveled next to him? They hadn't talked about it; they hadn't considered it. They hadn't considered a lot and this entire exercise had been a reminder of how naive they'd both been, how naive _she_ had been when she'd thought herself so smart and powerful and mature. 

She stopped the train of thought, shaking her head. "How close is 'closer'?"

Howard found the Patient X files and held them up, making a face. "Close. The HYDRA serum has a different mechanism, but the effects are similar in most ways, superior in a couple, deficient in a few. But that difference in mechanism is everything. What we gave Steve allowed the vita-rays to effect the physical transformation. If we stuck Barnes in that machine, it wouldn't do the same thing." He held up the papers again. "Those Frankensteins at Lehigh already considered it." 

Peggy had seen that part, along with the list of what else they wanted to test Barnes for and with; it would be onerous but not so much as to make a protest provided they could figure out the anesthesia this time around. Speaking of... 

"Have they figured out how to sedate him?" She'd been out of the building, elsewhere on the campus taking care of her own business, during the procedure itself. But she'd gotten the gist of what had happened while waiting for Barnes to regain consciousness; she was now and had been appalled, but not enough to cut off their access to Barnes. They needed this, needed anything they could get to figure out what The American might be capable of because they had _nothing_ right now. And if she couldn't completely ignore the voice of her conscience -- that sounded very much like Steve here -- telling her to value the man more than the mission, then she could at least do what she could to lessen that man's misery. "I can't let them have him again if they haven't."

(Steve would have been disappointed with her many times over the last seven years, doing -- and authorizing the doing -- of despicable deeds to keep the innocent safe. But what she was willing to do to Bucky Barnes... she'd liked to think they could have survived it. But in her heart of hearts, she wasn't completely sure.) 

"They've figured out what they were doing wrong," Howard replied with a smirk, reaching for the cigarette in the ashtray and then, realizing it had burned its way to ashes, reached for the tumbler of bourbon instead. He held it up to indicate an offer to pour her one and she nodded. "Which isn't the same thing as figuring out how to do it right."

He squinted into a tumbler by the decanter of bourbon -- as if Jarvis would let dirty glasses lie about, even in this maelstrom of productivity he otherwise left untouched -- and them poured her a couple of thick fingers. 

"The fundamental problem," he went on as he brought her the glass, holding up his own for a wordless toast, "is that nobody realized how badly off Barnes was back in '43, during the original tests. He'd been back with us for, what, two weeks before we sent him on to DC?" 

"Not even that," she admitted. "Ten days, maybe." 

And most of those ten days had been spent trying to pry him from the protective clutches of Steve, first by rule of law and then, when that failed, through their devil's bargain.

"Ten days, then," Howard agreed. "It took them eight days to get back to us, so Barnes was still less than three weeks out from everything. Not just the experiments -- the pneumonia and the malnourishment on top of the drugs. Go back before that to the less-than-glorious conditions the 107th had been living under with supply lines being what they were down there back then, throw in that he barely ate or slept once he got back and all of it adds up to _months_ of rotten conditions. And then we tested him like we had Steve right after he'd gotten out of the machine. 

"Wakefield wasn't an idiot in '43 and he wasn't an idiot back in May," he went on, pausing to take a drink. "They made allowances for Barnes's initial poor physical condition. They just underestimated. Badly. Back in '43, Barnes performed like a healthy and fit twenty-six-year-old man and, coupled with his rapid recovery during the eight-day march, it was easy to assume that whatever Zola had done to him, recuperative powers might've been the end of it. The data supports that completely. It just turns out that that's not what happened."

Because nine years of restorative comfort later, Bucky Barnes was apparently a super-soldier. 

"So I repeat my question," she said, taking a big gulp of the bourbon and feeling it burn all the way down. "How close is closer?"

Howard went back to the table with the file. "Barnes as he is now couldn't be The American," he said, which was the answer to the question she'd really asked. "But put him through an intense physical training regimen, maybe add some choice drugs and anabolic steroids to the mix, and he easily could be."

She eyed the remains of her drink, debating whether it was one big gulp or two more reasonable swallows, and opted for the former because it was that kind of conversation. "I think I'm supposed to be comforted by this," she said, looking at her empty glass. "But I'm not."

The primary purpose of testing Barnes had been to determine if there were more options for The American's identity than that Steve was somehow still alive and working for the Russians. Whether _any_ super-soldier was capable of The American's carnage or just the one. Having that answer be affirmative presented a whole host of other problems even as it allowed them to strike out the one that was both most likely and most impossible. In the updated files, Wakefield had raised the possibility of being able to use the distinct properties of the various serums to further identify The American's provenance, if not the man himself. But that required getting blood or tissue from a ghost and Peggy had written off that part of the proposal as interesting but not helpful.

"Better dead than red?" Howard asked with false lightness, but then dropped the act. "There's nothing about any of this that's going to be comforting, Peg. Rebirth got us Steve and for all that he was a remarkable gift -- to freedom, to America, to _us_ \-- Rebirth itself was just another weapons development project in a filthy war where nothing was off-limits.

"Abe Erskine was in an arms race with Schmidt and Zola and he knew it. And he also knew that to win that race, he'd have to let a genie out of the bottle that he wasn't going to be able to shove back in. He wanted to use the serum for good, to use it on people like Steve who would take what they were given and do great things with it. But he knew that to have that, the serum would also wind up in less noble hands and used for less noble purposes. He died before he had to face the consequences of that choice, but you and me, we get to face them. It's the booby prize for living to the end of the story."

Peggy had nothing good to say to that, so she went over to the bourbon decanter and refilled her glass.

"If it doesn't have to be Steve, then how close are we to figuring out who it could be?" Howard asked when she continued to say nothing and took a sip (just a sip) instead. He closed the file folder and emptied his own tumbler, holding it out for her to refill, which she did.

"Not terribly," she answered sourly. "We still have two choices: The American is someone who was given the serum during the War and is under Russian control or the Russians have figured out the serum well enough to start producing their own super-soldiers. The latter is less likely because The American's been active for so long that we would have heard something by now, but it's not impossible. That the American is one of Zola's poor chaps remains the front-runner. But Zola's still playing games there and knowing if that's possible, let alone who it could be, isn't something we can answer."

Zola had said that none of the eight men still listed as Missing after Steve destroyed the HYDRA base in Italy had been moved, which presumably meant that they'd died either in the lab or in the prison revolt. If Zola were telling the truth. After Italy, however, events were no simpler to track. There'd been fourteen months between the destruction of the base in Italy and when the Commandos had grabbed Zola off the train in Slovenia. They knew he'd spent the time in the NDH, recreating the work he'd lost and expanding his efforts into chemical aids for behavior modification because those were the papers he'd been captured with. They didn't know how many men he'd experimented on at the lab in the woods or who they'd been; the Yugoslavs had found the mass graves in '48 and had only given estimates of the count and no guesses on nationality because the lab, like the one in Italy, had also been attached to a work camp and many had died there without Zola's assistance. The overwhelming majority of the prisoners at the camp had been captured Russian soldiers, but there'd also been some Poles and, survivor reports had long insisted, the odd Westerner. It would have been a long trip to relocate any single soldier captured on the ground on the western front, but the Fifteenth Air Force alone had lost thousands of men all over the Mediterranean and Central and Eastern Europe. Almost all of them had been properly documented in POW camps throughout Reich territories, but if HYDRA had made one or two or six unlucky souls disappear forever, listing them as KIA when they hadn't been, there'd have been no way to tell. Schmidt had taken possession of Zola's notes after his capture, but there was absolutely no evidence that he'd continued testing the serum on his own and they'd spent months in his fortress looking.

"Can we find out from our little Minsk rat what the Soviets are up to on the serum?" Howard asked with a frown, looking around on his table for something with some urgency. Like the others, like Peggy herself, he'd never forgiven Izzy Goldman for his defection. Howard had never got on with Goldman and vice versa, the self-made millionaire and the slaughterhouse socialist were too far apart in views to be more than barely civil to each other and that was generally only when Steve had been in the room. After Steve's death, they hadn't even bothered trying, despite Howard being one of the few who believed that there had been nothing Goldman could have done to keep Steve from boarding the plane. "Isn't that why the Reds were so interested in him in the first place?"

Howard knew about Goldman's infrequent missives because Peggy needed to use his wealth and resources to assure nobody else did. Goldman's messages required untraced flights to Europe and deft avoidance of the MGB to retrieve and doing that with SHIELD resources was sometimes not possible.

"The Soviets wanted him for lots of reasons," she answered, eying the stool next to her and wondering whether Howard would mind if she either moved the papers or sat on them. "What he knew about how Steve had been transformed was the least of them."

Goldman's politics had been well-known even before he'd started pushing for the Commandos to take missions working with the Russians (Steve had gone along, to a point) and they'd all been both amused and irritated by his fervency. But with all of that, nobody had expected Goldman to do more than agitate, to maybe use his fame as a Commando for the cause once he'd returned to Chicago. And at first he had done just that, so the surprise had been complete when he'd disappeared six months after demobbing, turning up four months later at Joseph Stalin's side on the front page of _Pravda_. It had been a world-wide story: Captain America's right hand choosing socialism over the decadent democracy of the west. (And further proof that maybe Hitler hadn't been wrong about getting rid of the faithless Jews.) It had been a disaster for the US publicly, but a calamity behind the scenes as well because Goldman _had_ been Steve's right hand, had been privy to so much sensitive information that was now on offer to the Soviets. It had been the final nail in the SSR's coffin, had ended Chester Phillips's career in sudden and shameful fashion, and that SHIELD existed at all had been a miracle of Jesus-like proportion.

Her own career had not escaped taint, which was why she wasn't higher up in SHIELD than she was, but her culpability had been deemed minor because she'd been a woman without decision-making authority within the SSR and had only kept her place at the table because she'd been Steve Rogers's lover and having her around had made him biddable. It was bullshit, of course, but both Chester and Howard had sworn to it -- Chester had written her a lovely letter of apology after the fact -- to protect her. So she could protect the world, they'd both said and she'd never forgotten that.

"Goldman remains protective of Steve's legacy," she continued because Howard was still shuffling papers and models around on the table. "What he hasn't already destroyed, at least. He's doing what he can on the serum front, especially because of The American. But there are only so many questions he can ask without drawing suspicion. He's already had one vacation in Siberia and there's no guarantee he returns from a second." 

Goldman's efforts on behalf of SHIELD were limited in scope as much by what Goldman _wanted_ to give them as what he could. Goldman, as near as Peggy could tell, was still the committed socialist, but he'd lost his faith in Stalin's leadership. He loved Russia as run by the communists, but had grown to hate the Kremlin and while he'd do nothing to hurt the people or the cause of socialism, he'd slip SHIELD the odd tidbit that could keep Uncle Joe from barking quite as loudly. She couldn't figure out the moral pretzel he'd turned himself into to justify all he'd done and she wasn't at all sure that if they offered him a way out, he wouldn't take it. But there would be no offer; some scars did not heal. 

"Aha!" Howard dug out a piece of paper with what looked to be cross-sections of a rifle on it and held it up triumphantly. "Speaking of messages that should be sent to Moscow." 

He turned and attached the page to the overburdened corkboard with a push-pin, then turned back to her. He reached for the now-visible cigarette case and opened it, offering it out to her before taking one for himself after she refused. Howard smoked Chesterfields, which she didn't care for. "So what's the next step? Get on Zola?"

"We've been on Zola for eight years," she pointed out, making up her mind to move the papers on the stool and sit. "If we can swing it, it might be time to let our sister agencies work this from the other end for a while. Take away the brutality of the murders and these are just run-of-the-mill spy games, albeit played at a high level. And we are constantly being told that we aren't spy-hunters." 

SHIELD was supposed to be the agency called in to deal with the 'weird' things, the dangerous trinkets found in old HYDRA and Nazi bases, the technology that couldn't be understood, the events that couldn't be explained. It was how they'd gotten their charter approved against so much opposition -- it was presumed that once all of the HYDRA business was taken care of, SHIELD would be without a purpose and could be folded into another agency and disappeared.

But you couldn't have trinkets and technology and strange occurrences in a vacuum and so SHIELD was constantly hopping the fences into their neighbors' backyards and, far from being without a purpose, SHIELD was getting quite good at everyone else's job in addition to their own. Especially in Europe, where the various countries were busy reconstructing their borders and their cultures, SHIELD was frequently overstepping their charter by invitation. As they had when the Army -- more a friend now than they had been during the war -- had called them in after the murder of General Hansburton in Stuttgart. 

But being good at many things didn't mean that they were best at all of them and there were other agencies with more resources focused on Moscow; it might be time to let one of them see if they couldn't figure out who was picking The American's targets and see if that didn't bring them closer to his identity, if not a chance to do more. 

"We're told we aren't a lot of things," Howard agreed, using the first person he sometimes took with SHIELD and more often did not. He was a consultant, refusing a formal position, and there were times when he made the distinction very clear and times when it blurred beyond recognition. "But we're possibly the only agency without a Soviet spy on the director level, so..." 

Peggy could only sigh and take a healthy drink in both agreement and resignation. On both sides of the Atlantic, there were communists, communists everywhere, but while the Red Scare was mostly hype, there'd been far too many genuine articles to dismiss Howard's objection. She'd held off appealing for help so far because of Hiss and Chambers, Maclean and Burgess (and probably Philby, whom Peggy knew personally from their war days), the Rosenbergs awaiting execution after last year's conviction, it went on and on. "It could be as good as telling Moscow Center directly," she agreed. "But they're not being subtle about it and I don't think they think we're all fools. They'll be suspicious if we don't ask around."

Getting someone else to do the legwork in Moscow while keeping the investigation of The American's identity for themselves would make life easier and allay suspicions, but she'd have to see what the price would be first. An important lesson she'd learned from Chester during the war was the delicate art of avoiding turf wars you couldn't win. Chester had been a colonel up against generals and he'd been very good at protecting the SSR from grabby hands looking to take everything from their budget to Captain America himself; he'd cede credit for a victory or turn a mission over entirely to prevent generals and ministers from assuming even temporary control over SSR resources, especially the Howling Commandos. "Possession is one hundred percent of the law when the guy possessing it outranks you," he'd told her. The same was true now; the cost of asking for help with Moscow might end up being the loss of the case entirely.

Howard looked like he might have something pointed to say about Moscow's suspicions, but he never said it as Jarvis appeared in the doorway to tell them that dinner would be in fifteen minutes and Mrs. Jarvis had assumed that Peggy would be staying for it and prepared food accordingly. Chester's warning about fights you couldn't win applied particularly well to Mrs. Jarvis and Peggy accepted her fate -- delightful as it would be -- with grace.

* * *

"This is all you've come up with?" Peggy asked with a frown as she closed the case folder. Across from her, Agent Whitlaw seemed torn between embarrassment and indignation; he'd just presented his progress report on the rumored sighting of Oskar Bruner, a HYDRA sub-commander rumored to be living under an assumed name in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Whitlaw had reason to be embarrassed -- he'd made precious little headway on what had been an admittedly thin basis for investigation. But his inability to disguise his dislike of having to report to a woman had long ago made Peggy disinclined to spare his ego or his feelings. "Why haven't your people spoken to the Israelis?"

Whitlaw made a dismissive face. "What are they going to know that the FBI doesn't?"

His team had done their due diligence with Hoover's minions, at least. Who had given them nothing and he'd clearly been relying on points for trying when he'd presented her with their work.

"The FBI has a lot on its plate," she replied sourly, impatient after a day of case review that had admittedly been more good than bad before Whitlaw and his professional ennui had darkened her doorway. She enjoyed the teaching aspect of supervisory work, but Whitlaw was unteachable and so handling him fell under the administrative rubric of her job description, as joyful as compiling budget reports. "They are chasing mobsters and bank robbers and the perpetrators of all of the other sexy crimes they do so love taking credit for stopping. The Israelis have one goal: to hunt down their enemies and kill them. Bruner ran a labor camp in Silesia that used more than four thousand Polish Jews as slave labor and killed half of them. They have a vested interest in knowing where he is. Get someone to ask them."

She had finished on a tone that made if very clear that it hadn't been a suggestion. Whitlaw would not be openly insubordinate, nor was he passive-aggressive in any clever way. He was stubborn and unreceptive to change or novelty, be it lady supervisory agents or new technology, which had made her wonder more than once why he'd signed on for SHIELD instead of a more straightforward policing agency -- he'd been a beat cop in Cincinnati before this. Which in turn was why he'd been assigned the Bruner business instead of chasing down artifacts or anything else that required more flexibility and initiative. 

The rest of Whitlaw's case review went more smoothly; they were older cases where someone had clearly defined parameters for him or outright forced him to go down particular avenues of investigation and, when so guided Whitlaw was not the worst team leader under her command. Just the most draining.

After finishing with him, she grabbed her purse and fled her office, although not to go far, simply outside so that she could smoke in relative peace. It was late enough in the year that DC had stopped being quite the dank, mosquito-riddled cesspit it had been since the spring and was now almost pleasant -- so long as you could forget the business that went on here. London could lose her status as the seat of the Empire and still be a world-class city. The District of Columbia wasn't even a city and if the US Government packed up and moved back to Philadelphia or New York, it would revert to the swamp it had once been in short order and nobody would miss it.

"Agent Carter?" Barbara, her secretary, was standing by the door that led from the courtyard back into the building. "There's a call from the Director for you."

Peggy could narrow down the possible reason for the call if pressed, but chose to skip the guesswork entirely, stamp out what was left of her Camel with her shoe, and go back inside. Back in her office, having strode through the gauntlet of her entire staff's questioning looks -- they undoubtedly knew who was on hold -- she closed the door, cleared her throat, and picked up the handset.

Half an hour later, she was having Barbara book her a ticket for Norman, Oklahoma (for Dallas, really, and step-to, Ma'am, because it was the last flight of the day and getting up to Baltimore quickly this time of day was going to be impossible) because Arnim Zola had demanded an audience. Here there was room for a little speculation, especially because she didn't want to go into that meeting unprepared.

"Barbara, call Joad House and tell them I want everything from the last month's interviews waiting."

Joad House was the less-than-clever name for the compound where Zola was living out his days in barely restricted comfort. He had a laboratory inside his comfortable (but not extravagant) home where he completed projects assigned by SHIELD, entertained visitors, and taught a seminar's worth of graduate students from the nearby university. It was all under an assumed name, but if they didn't know that the little toad was Zola, they undoubtedly suspected that he hadn't been as neutral as his Swiss citizenship said he'd been.

When Zola wasn't living the life of a minor European noble in plebian exile, he was sitting with SHIELD agents recounting HYDRA's exploits and reviewing fresh intelligence with an eye toward the future. Peggy had been part of the debriefing team for the first two years, but as the historical pits had been mined of jewels, she'd been reassigned so that there were more pure scientists on the team. She'd been relieved, both to get away from Zola as well as for the chance to return to field work. Zola was smug and patronizing and so damned genius that you couldn't help but be unnerved. He enjoyed the sessions, the byplay, the chance to show off his brilliance, the access to fresh information not available to the general public. He especially loved being capricious, taunting and teasing the withholding of information because, as he was wont to point out, what could they do? Let him go so that the Russians could get him? (The answer to that was invariably no, but if they ever did let him go, they'd tell the Jews first.) Zola didn't want to go to Russia -- he thought the Soviet Union was a giant gulag and Peggy had still been on the detail when he'd gotten his hands on Kennan's 'long telegram' and remembered his joy of it. But Zola liked to play with his food and they were all chum to his shark, and this was not all that remarkable for any of the Operation Paperclip beneficiaries.

But what he wanted with her now, almost five years after she'd last seen him, concerned her. It stood to reason that it had to do with The American and all of the questions she'd been submitting to the debrief team to ask on her behalf. He had to realize something was up and, knowing him, he'd put together the victim list before he'd even been told -- if he'd even been told. She didn't think this meeting would be something so simple as him agreeing to stop playing games. He didn't need her for that and whatever joy he might get out of dragging her back from halfway across the country (or the world; Zola had no reason to know), it would be dampened by the fact that SHIELD took the wasting of agency money for airfare far more seriously than it did the wasting of agents' time. 

There was, thankfully, very little time wasted as she sped up toward Friendship Airport in the back seat of a company car. People she knew were envious of her frequent need to travel by air, but it had lost most of its charm for her. During the war, it had meant being a flying target, at risk of enemy attack, chaff, bad weather, poor navigation, or a pilot who'd been six days in theater and on his second sortie. After the peace, she had at first marveled at the amenities of civilian air travel, but somehow the clubby atmosphere with its full wineglasses during proper meals presented by gracious attendants served to emphasize everything she'd hated about flying during the war: the noise, the vibrations, the inevitable bruises from getting thrown around by turbulence. It was all much harder to take dressed like she had booked a first-class carriage on the railroad.

At least she'd get to Norman from Dallas late enough that Zola would have to wait until tomorrow, so she'd have time to recover from the one feature of air travel she heartily endorsed: the open bar. 

The head of the detail in Norman was a fellow named Sam Eisenstein, who'd led one of the interrogation units for the SSR during the war in part because of his psychology degree and mostly because he could understand the German spoken by the HYDRA captives. (When asked how much the captives understood when he spoke to them in Yiddish, he'd famously shrugged and said that a .45 between the teeth improved comprehension remarkably.) Sam had been with the unit since the start, although he hadn't been head of it when Peggy had been a member, and she was very fond of him. He'd brought his family out to Oklahoma from Michigan and, after seeing how much the war had taken out of him, she always felt a little better seeing him now -- a little thicker around the middle, but so much lighter in every way that counted. He was good at his job, at this job -- handling Zola was no task for amateurs -- but he was no longer looking like he'd be crushed by it. 

"I don't know what he's after," Sam admitted as they sat in his office the following morning, coffee and occupied ashtrays in front of both of them. She'd read the transcripts last night and again this morning and hadn't gotten any more of an inkling for why she'd been summoned. "We've been asking him about the other men he'd experimented on, but I'm starting to think there aren't any. After all of these years, I can tell when he's holding out and I don't think he is with this. My guess is that the ones in Italy were dead when Cap got there and if he'd had any living victims at the place in the NDH when the Commandos got him off the train, then Schmidt killed them when he cleared out the lab. But I don't think he dragged you out here to tell you that."

She respected Sam too much to dismiss his instincts, as much as it made the identity of The American that much harder to determine and that much more dangerous. If he wasn't one of Zola's subjects, then could he have been Schmidt's? Or was he a Soviet product after all, and if he was, was it because they'd picked up the necessary personnel during Operation Osoaviakhim? Or because they'd had Steve's remains all along and gotten something from them? There was no least worst option. All they could say was that at least there wasn't going to be an American now approaching his tenth year as a POW, first of the Nazis and now of the Soviets.

"I'm at a loss, too," she admitted. The transcripts were full of questions about HYDRA's interest in nuclear physics and rocketry and more names that they'd gotten of people swept up by Osoaviakhim and Zola's own work on amnestics and hypnotic chemical agents. Nothing that concerned her or any of the open cases in her section back at headquarters. "There's one way to get the answer, though."

Her appointment with Zola was after lunch; his mornings were spent working on his SHIELD projects and lunch was inviolable. Sam drove her out there at one, pulling through the gates and driving straight toward what had previously been a garage but was now the interrogation room. While Zola had the run of the compound as if he were its ruler, the interrogation room made it clear who had the power and what the relationships truly were. It was more comfortable than what they'd used during the war -- or what SHIELD used now on less precious interviewees -- but still spartan and devoid of all warmth and personality save that the chairs on both sides of the table were comfortable. 

"Agent Carter," Zola greeted her with a satisfied smile. "I'm glad you could make it." 

By agreement, Sam had dismissed the others and waited outside and Peggy was left on her own to grimace in response. "You called, I'm here."

Zola, blessedly, didn't beat around the bush or play coy, which she noted as an indicator that he probably wanted something from her and wanted it badly enough to behave. 

"I would like to offer you an exchange," he told her. "You might wish to stop the recording." He gestured with a head-tilt to the reel-to-reel tape slowly unspooling. 

"I think we do better when you're on the record for posterity," she told him. 

"Very well," he agreed, making it clear he thought she was being spiteful for its own sake. "Agent Eisenstein would like a list of names from me, the men involved in developing rockets for HYDRA. He would like this very much. I believe he fears the Soviets are closer than America would like to a viable intercontinental ballistic missile capable of a nuclear payload. It is a valid fear, although perhaps not as much here, so far from any city worth bombing. Nonetheless, it is a prize of great value and, after considering, I have calculated that value."

Peggy skipped the usual retort about how his continued ability to draw breath should be prize enough, instead arching an eyebrow in expectation. 

"I would like to read the complete and updated files on Sergeant Barnes."

Her first impulse was to stop the tape, but she quelled that urge, fighting the shock of his words. She could destroy the tape later, if she wanted, but right now, it was very important to have this on the record. 

"And what makes you think such a thing exists?" She was glad it came out in a normal tone of voice. 

During her years on Zola's interrogation team, Barnes had come up often enough. Zola had certainly known of the story of Captain America and Sergeant Barnes by the time of his capture and had spoken at length about the initial experiments he'd conducted on Barnes and their limited success. Hollywood had made films where Barnes had gotten off his prison deathbed (always in a cell in the pictures, never a lab) to march home to freedom and if the public hadn't understood that it had been more than movie magic, Zola certainly had. It would have been an easy guess that the SSR would have taken Barnes in for testing and Zola had asked her for the results several times, a wish never granted. That he'd ask for them again now, when she'd been sending questions about The American, should not have come as a surprise, But it was the mention of an update that made her heart flutter. Did they have a mole here? Was someone on the detail giving intel to Zola that he should never have seen? 

"Agent Carter," Zola sighed, fond smile on his face. "After five years of almost no mention, I have been bombarded by questions about the serum, about what I did with it, what Schmidt did with it, and who might still have it running through their veins. Do you expect me to believe that Sergeant Barnes has been left to his own devices this entire time? No, you've found him, wherever he is, and you are running every test you can on him to see if he could be the mysterious killer." 

He leaned back, sunny expression on his face. "And I want it all. The original ones, the current ones, all of it. And when I have it, you'll have your rocketry experts and what they know."

Peggy took a deep breath and sighed, then closed her notebook and reached over and stopped the tape. "Doctor Zola, you know how the waste of resources in service to your whims is frowned upon. I didn't need to be flown out here for this. I could have told you 'no' without leaving my office. And unless you have something else, it is to my office that I shall be returning."

She shouldered her purse, picked up her notebooks, and left without turning back. Once the heavy metal door closed behind her, she muttered an emphatic "fuck!" and went toward the observation room where Sam was waiting. She dropped her things on one end of the couch and sat down heavily on the other. "Fuck!" she repeated for emphasis. 

Once upon a time, she'd had lessons in comportment and could express her outrage and frustration in elegant, if not necessarily polite, terms. Then she'd spent a war surrounded by Americans and learned, as her parents put it, to speak like she'd been raised in a barnyard. But this was a barnyard situation and she didn't yet know how deep the manure was.

"I didn't see that one coming," Sam admitted as he pulled out a cigarette and lit it for her; her hands were shaking too much to dig through her purse for her own. "He hasn't mentioned Barnes in years. Everything we asked about the experiments he did, about what got left behind in the NDH, he never brought Barnes up once. Not by name and not by inference. I don't think anyone else here would even know what he was talking about if he did. That's been classified so highly that, these days, I'm the only one here who can even ask Zola about the serum."

Sam, of course, knew the true story of James Barnes. He'd been in Italy with her and the rest of the SSR headquarters staff when Steve had brought his POWs back and the two of them had spent the better part of a week conducting interviews with the returnees before focusing on the men who'd seen Zola's and Schmidt's labs: the burial detail and the one man who'd come out of there alive. 

"How important is the rocketry intel?" she asked after taking a couple of deep drags on the cigarette. 

Sam sighed. "Very. You've seen the transcripts. Everyone's terrified about nukes now that the Soviets have the bomb and Moscow's starting to shoot off rockets that can travel a bit, although probably not going as far as they say they do in _Pravda_. The eggheads don't think the Russkies will be able to stand in Siberia and hit LA for a few years, at least. But in this climate, the Powers That Be are more prepared to take Uncle Joe's word for it than ours. But the answer to the question you don't want to ask is yes, the Board would hand over Barnes's file for this without blinking."

Peggy flicked ash into the bowl provided to buy herself a moment to think. Whether this would have happened if she hadn't gone to Barnes earlier this year was a moot point; Zola had wanted Barnes's files for so long and now was just a perfect opportunity to get them. But he hadn't asked for them in years even when he'd had other valuable intelligence to trade and she didn't think for a moment that he'd forgotten them and she couldn't escape the feeling that this was all her fault, even if she couldn't explain exactly how. And so not only had she broken her promise to Steve less than ten years after making it, she was also at risk of breaking her promise to Barnes in less than ten _months_. The files only mentioned Patient X, but Zola knew who that was and the next time he had something worth trading, he could ask if Barnes had children and for their blood and tissue, too. Some of the changes were heritable; Barnes's family would never be free, not his three children -- Steven John was almost two months old -- and, depending on how long Zola lived, not their children, either. Especially because of what the new tests had told them. 

"We can't let him have it," she said, watching the smoke curl up from the cigarette. "It would be like giving a rapist framed photos of his victim." 

She'd never misunderstood the fundamental horror of what she'd asked Barnes to do, but she'd hoped that the desperation of it, the sincerity of the need, would help offset the sordidness. This would just be exploitive and would allow the perpetrator of those horrors to relive his past glories.

"We may not have a choice," Sam said, then looked up at her. "You really brought him back for more?"

She grimaced. "We needed to know what an imperfect recreation of the serum could do," she replied, bringing the cigarette to her lips. "We haven't had a test subject since '45 and I doubt that whoever wins the election next month will let SHIELD amend the conditions required to get another one."

There had been one round of tests in '45 to see if Erskine's assistants had recreated his work. They hadn't and it was very fortunate that they didn't kill Isaiah Bradley finding that out. Truman had all but banned future human testing -- he'd been appalled at the original Rebirth when he'd finally been told about it. Eisenhower, likely to be the next president, had thought highly of Steve and treated the SSR with more respect than his generals would have liked, but a platoon of super-soldiers would not make the mess in Korea go away any faster and he'd know that, too. 

"That's a shitty justification," Sam said bluntly, holding her gaze evenly when she glared at him. "Who cares how super a Russian super-soldier would be? Unless they're working off of Zola's notes, what Barnes can and can't do won't tell us anything about their guy.... Unless that guy is Steve. Oh, _Peggy_..."

Peggy stubbed out her cigarette angrily. "I'm not the only one who wants to know what happened to him," she said tartly. That Sam's pity was genuine only made it more unwanted. "But this is about more than him. The Russians have been working on the super-soldier serum for as long as we have, but we had Abraham Erskine and they didn't. They haven't gotten close yet, no closer than we have, but suddenly there's a super-soldier and he's been active for them for at least five years. Which is less than a year after the Russians ended the salvage of the _Valkyrie_ and swore to us that there'd been no sign of Captain America anywhere.

"I don't think The American is Steve," she said, straightening her skirt. "I think Steve is dead and has been since 1945. But someone with extraordinary abilities is killing people on our side and that falls under SHIELD's mandate and then to me. I brought Barnes back in for testing because while I think Steve is dead, I don't know for sure and neither does anyone else. And what we found out is that while The American could, in theory, be Steve, it's also possible for it to be anyone else with a variant of the serum developed by HYDRA in 1943 or later. Including James Barnes."

Sam sat back, arms crossed. "Barnes wasn't exactly bench-pressing Fords back in '43."

Peggy laughed mirthlessly. "He's a lot closer to being able to do it now," she replied. "Close enough that we could possibly bridge the gap if he were willing and we were desperate. Close enough that Zola would want to. That's why he can't see those results, Sam. He doesn't know how near he came to re-deriving the serum and if he ever finds out, we start sliding down that slope and we don't stop until we reach the bottom."

She had many regrets about bringing Barnes back for testing, starting with breaking her promise to Steve and inflicting such trauma on a man who'd suffered enough already. The second round, last month, had been terrible even with better pain management; the pneumoencephalograph, which she'd never have let them perform if she'd known what it entailed, had left Barnes dizzy and weak and vomiting for hours. But none of them matched her fear that she'd done exactly what Steve had feared would happen: she'd shone a spotlight on a new door to the super-soldier serum where the key was James Barnes. Wakefield knew what he had, but despite his failings as a man, he would not take the risks Zola would and, if it ever came to it, they could shut him down completely. Zola was not so easily controlled; he was too valuable and, frankly, his amorality was a bonus -- SHIELD asked of him things they would not have the guts to request of anyone else. What he asked for in return and could expect to receive went by the same warped judgment. Which was why he felt comfortable asking for Barnes's folder in the first place. 

"We can burn the tape," Sam began slowly, "but Zola's put his request on the table. The next time someone asks him about the nuke rockets, he's going to tell them to talk to you. And I can quash those statements from the official records, but not forever. The bosses want those names, Peg, and telling them that if we give Zola what he wants for them, then the consequences will justify restarting Project Rebirth will not exactly be a disincentive."

Peggy tapped her fingers on her knee, noticing for the first time that the polish on her right ring finger was badly chipped. She folded her hand into a fist to hide it. "How much time can you give me?" 

There were other ways to get the names. More expensive ways, in blood or treasure or both, but it was possible. And in the end, it would be cheaper to have paid this price than to pay the larger one of the consequences of Zola getting what he wanted. She had a few Soviet contacts besides Izzy Goldman, so did people who owed her favors. She could cash in a few -- all of them -- if it kept them from this. It wouldn't stop Zola from asking for Barnes's file again the next time he had something they really wanted, but those times had been growing fewer and further between as the calendar pages turned. Zola had been their prisoner for eight years and questioned for all of them; what he had left to tell them dwindled with each passing day -- as did it's relevancy. 

""A few months, tops," Sam replied, tilting his head curiously. "What did you have in mind?" 

She smiled, a real smile. This was doable. "Devaluing the currency Zola has and wishes to trade," she answered. "If I can get a name or two from another source, then what he has is no longer worth Barnes's file."

Sam frowned thoughtfully, then smiled, too. "If you've got the connections, it could work. But I'm not sure this one's going to be so easy." 

"Wouldn't want it any other way, would we?" She reached across the couch for her notebook and purse. Arrangements would have to be made for the trip back to DC and she'd probably be in either Oklahoma or Dallas for another day unless there was an evening flight. 

"Yes, yes we would," Sam replied, standing, too. But she didn't think he really meant it. 

* * *

She'd been in Athens catching up with old 'friends' and newer acquaintances -- the civil war might be over, but chaos still reigned in Greece and it was easy enough for spies to meet without witnesses -- when the telegram arrived. It had been been waiting for her return to her hotel after a visit to a cafe in Marousi, where, over frappé and American cigarettes (a breath of fresh air to someone used to smoking Belomorkanals), she'd gotten two names for Sam's list of rocketry experts in exchange for a modest fee and a carton of Camels. The price was less steep than it seemed; the intelligence had been impossible for the Soviets to acquire, but that didn't make it valuable in its own right and the Swiss deserved whatever they got if the Soviets managed to do something with it. 

The telegram was heavily coded, but straightforward: The American had struck again, this time in Brussels. At the Hotel Metropole, of all places, where he'd dispatched a French diplomat and his wife (his actual wife, not his 'wife,' as was often the case with both Frenchmen and hotel killings) with what by now was typical violence. The room had been so badly splattered with blood that it would need to be redone entirely, down to replacing the floor underneath the expensive carpeting. The bodies had been discovered this morning and it would be above the fold on every broadsheet in Europe tomorrow. There were closer agents -- SHIELD had agents in Brussels, plus Paris and all over Germany -- but The American was her case and all personnel would be at her disposal.

The concierge, after the healthy application of US dollars -- she'd learned not to tip in anything but greenbacks during her war years -- confirmed for her that there was a Sabena flight to Brussels leaving in two hours. She got to Ellinikon with a half-hour to spare, bought her ticket, and spent the flight plotting a course of action for when she landed in Belgium. 

The first priority would be to see who knew what about what; this was an international incident and the first call after the one to the Brussels constabulary would have been to the French embassy, which in turn would have immediately dispatched their SDECE representative and official security officer. The Russians were going to be nowhere to be found, but the SIS and the CIA were probably already sniffing about; as an agency, the CIA was still figuring out how to put their trousers on one leg at a time, but even they could follow enough smoke to a fire. The local SHIELD agent, who probably normally spent his time tracking down black marketeers dealing in HYDRA weapons, was hopefully on the case as well, but she didn't know what to expect on that front.

All of this was expected and Peggy was happy to let the others collate the easily-acquired facts; it would save her the effort. The question was whether anyone would notice that this was part of a larger puzzle. 

The extraordinary details of the murder of General Hansburton in Stuttgart had been buried quite thoroughly; as far as anyone knew, he'd been the victim of a mugging gone wrong. The death of the SIS man in Berlin was known within spy circles, but mostly by rumor and so many agents on all sides went down in that city that it hardly rated as curious. The UN official and his mistress in Paris were public knowledge -- the dismemberment hadn't been successfully kept from the press and the gory details helped turn eyes from a sour economy and governmental incompetence, hence everyone thinking they were the source of the leak -- but the UN official had also been from Pakistan and it had been easy enough to hint about that the Indians had been behind it, or maybe some intra-religious thing, or something else that had carried over from the violence in that part of the world. 

The latest victims were Monsieur et Madame Florent Descoliers, which she found out upon arriving in Brussels and being met by Girardi, the local SHIELD man. Girardi knew nothing about The American or that this murder fit a pattern and she hoped that his ignorance was an indicator of general common knowledge and not of his own incompetence. Brussels was not an important posting for SHIELD, not compared to the German or Balkan stations, and Girardi was a young enough man that he would have joined SHIELD and not the SSR. She asked him if he'd been in uniform during the war, since she'd found that made a difference -- sometimes better, sometimes worse -- with the younger agents. 

"During the fighting, no," he answered, maneuvering his Salmson Randonnée -- exactly the kind of car a young man paid in American dollars in Europe would drive -- into traffic as they left the airport. "I got to basic training a week before Truman got to Potsdam, so they shipped me off to Germany afterward to put the place back together. Got a head start on the Cold War, though." 

She hadn't been in Brussels in years, after the war, but before it had gotten cleaned up enough to try to pretend there hadn't been one. The Germans hadn't made too much of a mess while they'd occupied it, but getting rid of them had. There were obviously new buildings, but it still looked the same. Perhaps a little less worn down, but it was evening and street lamps hid a multitude of sins.

"What can you tell me about Descoliers?" she asked as they were slowed by congestion on a street planned out hundreds of years before the invention of automobiles. 

"Descolier's a career diplo," Girardi began, eyes on the car in front of them, which was edging slowly forward in fits and starts. "Arrived here in March, heads up their economics section. Before Brussels, it was Bucharest, before Bucharest it was Amman. Maybe the next posting would've been Copenhagen if he was working alphabetically."

"Brussels would have come before Bucharest were that the case," she answered, although she kept her tone light enough for it to be obvious she was making a joke and not being a pedant. "What was he doing during the war?"

The Romania posting could have put him on the Soviets' list, but there was a chance the enmity dated back earlier if he'd been one of the Resistance who'd had no truck with the communists. Allied agents had seemingly spent half of their time in France keeping one group of partisans from trying to kill the other instead of the Germans; the Commandos had brought back stories of Dernier getting them into and out of trouble, sometimes on the same mission. 

"Free Frenchman, was with de Gaulle in Algiers," Girardi answered. "Not a big shot, but was one of those guys who got things done under the radar, so to speak. Didn't come back to France until '48, but nobody seems to know what he was doing there for the Fourth Republic. When he did come back, however, it was to the Foreign Affairs ministry and that's where he's been since."

They lurched forward suddenly and Girardi murmured an apology. 

"Is he a spy, then?" Peggy asked, retrieving her purse from where it had been thrown. If he was, it would make both her jobs -- the discovery of why he'd been targeted and how best to hide it -- easier. 

"Our special friends -- or I guess your countrymen -- say no," Girardi answered. "CIA station is full of guys who've only been here a week, seems like, and they know nothing about nothing. But the French are making a lot of noise and I don't think they'd be doing that if he really had been SDECE." 

Peggy made a noise of agreement. "Have our opposite numbers checked in?"

Girardi blew a raspberry. "Nyet. Which could be interesting or it could just mean that Sergei was off somewhere with his honey last night." 

The world of spies had its own rules of friendship; you could be enemy agents actively working toward the destruction of the other's country, could have made legitimate attempts on the other's life, but in a life where there were necessarily few connections, a camaraderie existed that couldn't easily be explained to outsiders.

After getting through the bottleneck, Girardi sped up.

"Nobody seems to know what's going on," he said when Peggy asked him about any theories for the murders. "The Descoliers have an apartment in town, but they'd booked in at the Metropole for some kind of anniversary celebration. There's nothing about them that makes you think they were at risk for much of anything -- he wasn't a drunk or a gambler, she didn't spend all their money -- and they didn't seem to inspire much passion in anyone in the diplo circle, one way or the other. The French Deputy Head of Mission would've been everyone's first choice of murder victim, if there'd been a poll."

Girardi parked on a side street, explaining that nobody could get near the Metropole in a car right now. She looped her arm through his elbow so that they looked like lovers taking a stroll -- street lamps did hide so much. The area in front of the hotel was flooded with police, mostly occupied with keeping the press and gawkers at bay; the strobe of flashlights bright in the night. The liveried doormen were at their posts, but nobody came through the doors.

"Guests are using the side entrances for now," Girardi explained as they sauntered around the edge of the Place de Brouckère. "Those who are still here; there was an exodus this afternoon."

She would need to get closer, but it would be better to do it tomorrow, when attention was less focused.

"You wouldn't have happened to have spoken to anyone inside, would you?" she asked as they passed tiny tables and chairs stacked up against a metal cart near a planter. A modest café, perhaps, or something else more _Continental_ than the coffee carts and hot dog stands she passed in New York and DC. The concession wasn't directly in front of the Metropole, but she'd guess that a well-chosen table would have an excellent view.

"I didn't," Girardi replied, sounding embarrassed. "The cops were six deep when I got here."

She fought the urge to pat his arm; he'd done an impressive job today -- in quality and quantity of information acquired -- in a short time and she'd been impressed. All without asking why a senior SHIELD agent was being flown in from another mission to look for a murderer of a French diplomat. 

"But I know someone who probably did," he added hopefully. "I know a reporter, covers the crime beat for one of the seedier dailies. If Max hasn't gotten it all already, I'll eat my hat."

He led her away from the hullabaloo of the Place de Brouckère and through streets that grew narrower and more ill-lit. Their pace was no longer that of strolling lovers, but more purposeful, less enticing to anyone wishing to take advantage. Not that said anyone would get very far; they were both carrying pistols and she could more than hold her own in a fight.

"Seedy reporters need a seedy bar," Girardi explained as he paused at the head of a lane; the streetlight barely lit a sign that probably hadn't been cleaned since the Habsburgs had run the country. "What's your cover?"

The cover she was traveling under was that of a personal secretary to a London banker enjoying a holiday, but that would do her no good here. "Army Intelligence," she replied after a moment's pause. "Nobody will be asking to see my credentials and it's close enough to what I did during the war. And if I speak in French, nobody will know that I speak proper English and not what you Americans consider it to be."

The bar was certainly not high class, but not so low that a woman walking in would automatically be assumed to be either very lost or a whore. It was more run down than seedy, the way European drinking establishments of a certain age got -- some grew elegant in their venerability, but most just grew old along with their regular clientele. She could forgive the young American escorting her for not appreciating the subtle differences.

They found spots at the far end of the bar, away from the noise and the better lighting; the majority of the patrons were sitting around small tables, eating and drinking and chatting in French and Flemish, mostly the latter. She asked for a pint in French when the barkeep asked Girardi in accented English what the lady would be having and a full pint was what she got; this wasn't the kind of place to automatically demote a woman to a half.

As she took her first sip -- the Belgians weren't nearly the sophisticates that they thought they were, but when they weren't putting on airs, they produced excellent beer -- Girardi looked around and made a noise by her ear to indicate that he'd found Max. "Be right back," he told her.

Maxence Tobback was a slippery-looking fellow whose eyes, even in the dim lighting, were both penetrating and yellowed with alcoholism. But he was sharp and clearly smelled a story and wanted to know why Army Intelligence was here and so quickly.

"I was here already," she replied. "Unrelated case."

Max tilted his head as if to say that that was an insufficient answer.

"Serial burglary," she added with apparent reluctance. "Ten hotel robberies in a month in Paris, only description of the suspect is that he is tall and looked like an American GI. Which did not exactly narrow down the list. But then the robberies suddenly stopped. Three months later, there are two burglaries at the Palace Hotel here that fit the bill. There was another last night at the Metropole, but it got lost in the greater drama. The number of servicemen who were in Paris then and Brussels now is much more manageable."

Max took this in, nodding slowly. Her story was plausible, although there was a huge risk in rattling off fake crimes to a crime reporter, but hotel burglaries happened all the time and the better the hotel, the harder they worked to pretend it didn't happen to them.

"Tony said that you were Army Intelligence," he finally said, gesturing behind him with his chin to Girardi, who was looking nervous. "They don't investigate burglaries in civilian hotels. CID does, maybe."

Ah, the peril of trying to fib in a country that had had the US Army crawling all over it for years. But she was a pro and instead of looking afraid that she'd been caught in a lie, she arched an eyebrow meaningfully.

"It depends what's being taken, doesn't it?" she asked, taking a healthy sip of her beer. "And I don't need you enough to tell you any more. I'll pay for what you have, but in currency, not in kind."

Max accepted that the game had been played out; he'd won enough to save face and, if he worked it right, a story, which amounted to the same thing.

Peggy was gracious in her victory and asked him what he was drinking.

"Funny you should be looking for an American," Max began after he'd been given a healthy pour of brandy. Peggy would bet gold coins that his usual tipple was the local plonk, but Americans had the reputation of being over-generous and a little credulous, so she let it slide. It was all expensed, anyway. "There was one at the sandwich stand for half the day yesterday. Said he was on 'R-and-R' from Germany, had one sandwich and a cup of coffee, no refills, but he was there for four hours taking up prime real estate for only ninety francs. Typical. Theo couldn't kick him out because the deal with the concession is that the tables are the city's and anyone who wants to sit there can. So he did, doodling on the sandwich paper. The drawing was of the Metropole, quite good."

She nearly didn't hear the last over the pounding of her heart in her ears. She'd used the story of an American GI because it was plausible and, if The American turned out to be actually _American_ , then it might help. But she hadn't... oh, _God_.

"Did you see the drawing, then?" she asked, hoping she sounded more curious than terrified.

"I have it," Max replied smugly, tapping his chest over where his inside breast pocket presumably was.

She gave him an expectant look and he, in turn, looked at his empty glass. She drained the last of her beer and told Girardi to order a pair of cognacs. Max smiled approvingly and reached into his jacket.

The drawing was indeed lovely, despite the grease spots from the sandwich. Not as refined as some of what she'd seen from that hand, but it wasn't the worst, not by far. The style was relaxed, unhurried, and yet very clearly with intent.

"You can see where the numbers of the floors are written on the corners of the edifice," Max pointed out knowingly, jabbing with a stubby finger. Peggy smiled because Max knew nothing at all. Nor, in this moment, did she because her entire world had fled somewhere she couldn't reach. "The number of rooms per floor, the detail of the windows down to the latches... A pro, hein?"

Peggy turned away for a moment, pulling her mirror out of her purse so she could see what she looked like as she pretended to examine her lipstick. She seemed remarkably normal, she decided, and while professionally she was relieved, personally she wondered why.

She spun casually back around on her seat, looking straight at Max.

"How much do you want for it?" she asked.

Max smiled, a 'come on, it doesn't work like that' kind of disappointed smile. They'd played so well earlier and he wanted another round.

"I told you I'd pay you in currency, not in kind," she said. "So what do you want for it?"

Max raised his chin, smelling a score. "A hundred dollars."

That would be at least month's salary here, probably more depending on how wretched the ink-stained wretches of Brussels were.

She reached for her snifter and downed the contents all at once. "Deal."

Behind Max, Girardi coughed on his beer and needed his back slapped by a laughing Max. "You, too, someday you'll run with the big dogs." 

A hundred dollars was the sum total of her useful paper currency; she had a few drachmas and American coins, but she'd need to wire for money to get home, let alone figure out where to sleep tonight. If she slept at all. Right now, she felt like she'd never sleep again.

She counted out the money with Max and a still-gobsmacked Girardi watching and held it out with one hand, the other extended palm up, expectantly.

"Let's go," she told Girardi when the exchange had been made and she'd put the drawing inside her own clothes. "Settle up, please."

Max, hearing British English, startled. She looked back at him, daring him to say something. But he knew better, knew that whoever she really was was not important and possibly dangerous.

She made it out of the bar on steady feet, but once outside, she gulped cool air and tried not to break down crying. She had reached the limit of ability to hold it all in; the fear, the pain, the _horror_ she'd been carrying around since she'd first heard of The American, it was overwhelming her all at once and she wanted nothing more than to collapse and pretend she was somewhere else, some _one_ else. And not the woman who was going to have to track down the love of her life, whom she'd already mourned as dead, because he had been turned into a savage killer by her country's (countries') enemy.

_What the hell happened to you, Steve?_

"Ma'am?"

"I'm fine, Agent Girardi," she replied, sounding anything but to her own ears. She turned to him and could see in his face that he didn't believe her at all. But she had rank on him and rank had its privileges and one of those privileges was that if she said that she was fine, then he could not offer anything approaching comfort. "But I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to lend me a few francs so I can find a place to sleep tonight."

* * *

"Ah, geez, Peggy."

Howard looked as surprised as he'd ever seen him -- or at least since she'd shot at Steve back in '43. But he sounded more concerned than amused as Jarvis helped her into -- poured her into -- the back seat of the car idling in a no-parking zone at Idlewild's international arrivals. He'd stayed in the car to avoid causing a scene by being recognized, which was just as well because Peggy sure as hell did not want attention drawn to her while in this state. Any more than she already had. 

She had started drinking as soon as the plane had taken off and while there'd been a break for food and then a walk outside the plane at one of the stops -- both strongly encouraged by the flight attendant staff, who'd watched her carefully on the plane's staircase -- she'd continued until they'd put away the drinks cart as they'd approached New York. She wasn't a loud drunk or a particularly messy one, but she was a maudlin one and it had only amplified her grief.

"You want to tell me what the hell happened in Brussels?" Howard asked gently as they began the ride to Manhattan.

She'd sent a telegram to the Director when she'd wired for money; all she'd said was that she had confirmation of their quarry's identity. All she'd told Howard in his telegram was when to pick her up at the airport.

In answer, she pulled the drawing out from where it had been tucked into her brassiere, not risking leaving it in her luggage or even in her coat pocket. She handed it over to Howard and closed her eyes as she heard him unfold it, opening them again because she felt the world spin slower if she could see. She looked out the window instead, not really seeing.

She heard his startled reaction, but didn't look over, not wanting to see the pain on his face. He and Steve had been oddly matched friends, not close but very much enjoying each other's company, which she thought had surprised them both. Howard had mourned deeply when Steve's plane had gone down -- she couldn't say 'died' anymore -- although she'd been too wrapped up in her own grief to notice it much. But they'd been much closer afterward, the occasional friction of their SSR working life dissipating.

"I don't even know what to say," Howard eventually said. "I knew it was a possibility, but I'd never considered it a likely one. I'd reconciled myself to the Soviets having found his body and using it to build their own."

"They did," she said softly.

"Yeah," he agreed.

They sat in silence, the car sailing smoothly over the brand-new Van Wyck Expressway.

"We're in Queens," she said suddenly. "We should tell Barnes."

"We'll tell Barnes," he assured her. "But tomorrow. I'll drive you out myself."

They said nothing more for the rest of the trip. Peggy let herself be escorted to a bedroom prepared for her use, where she washed her face, changed into her night clothes, and slept until almost nine at night, when Jarvis woke her with a discreet knock on the door and the announcement that a light dinner would be served at half past. By silent agreement, they didn't discuss Steve at all, instead Howard regaled her with stories of the development of his latest rifle -- the one she'd watched him scrounge for the blueprint of -- for the upcoming Army tests to pick a new weapon for the service.

"It's a given that the soldiers want a whole bunch of tricks that can't be done at the same time," he explained. "And the ones that can be done at the same time, the Army's not going to want to pay for. Also, the French want in and the joke there is that they can just hand over the weapons that were issued out in '39, they're all unused."

She went to the mansion's library after eating, Howard saying he needed to finish something in the workshop before he joined her, but she knew him and accepted tea and cookies from Jarvis and settled in with a book. She went back upstairs a little after midnight without seeing Howard again and fell asleep with surprising ease. She awoke feeling more alert and more human, but no less hollow. 

With a clearer head, she could revisit the months after the plane crash with a more objective eye. They hadn't simply trusted the Russians that they'd never found any trace of Steve's body; they'd done their own search -- Howard had designed a new sonar for the purpose -- and every agency had sent whatever spies they could to the Black Sea region to make sure the Russians weren't being underhanded about anything important. (That they were lying about a lot of things went without saying.) The condition of Schmidt's body had dimmed a lot of hope that Steve might have either survived or that his remains could be recovered; Schmidt hadn't been as enhanced as Steve, but he'd been close and he'd still been torn to shreds in the explosion. 

Peggy had gone to the Black Sea along with the Commandos; Chester hadn't wanted her to go, hadn't wanted the boys to go, but he'd let them go in the end. He'd grumped that they were all useless otherwise anyway, but if he'd really wanted to force them to return to normal operations, he could have. There was still a war on. But it was a war that was all but over for them; there had been talk of sending the Commandos to the Pacific theater, but that ended abruptly with Steve's disappearance. So they'd gone to Constanta with Howard, sitting on the boat every day doing nothing useful but simple tasks like coiling rope and moving antennae for Howard and his more-trained assistants and making tea (in her case) until their restlessness overcame their grief and they returned to London to go back to work. She'd returned exhausted and heartsick and numb, no better off than she'd left, but life had to go on. They'd been together fourteen months, although they'd been in love longer than that, and she had to be grateful for it. She hadn't been the first or the fifth woman she'd known to lose a lover, just one of the last in a long, horrid line of grief.

She had effectively led the Commandos in the last few months of the war; Izzy Goldman had been in charge of the practical elements, like any good NCO (and despite everything that had come later, Goldman had been that), and she'd chosen where to go and what to do when they got there. They'd mostly played treasure hunter, swooping in after the regular troops had secured an area, and looking for what HYDRA might have left behind. They'd done good work and, in the process, they'd healed a little. Not enough, but enough to go on. 

The months of numb grief faded into a quiet ache that never went away but grew gradually easier to bear. She'd moved to New York, joking at the time that she might as well put citizenship to her Americanization (Howard had been her sponsor), then to Kansas, which was where they'd first parked Zola, and then to DC when SHIELD had decided that she'd served her penance of exile for not being prescient about Goldman. She'd made tentative friends, she'd dated, she tried to _live_ instead of just be about her work. She'd never forgotten Steve, but she'd come to terms with him no longer being an active part of her life. She'd been proud of herself for not being one of those war widows who still sat waiting for someone who would never come home. 

But that pride tasted like ashes now because she should have been waiting, should have been wondering, should have been _looking_ because if anyone had been going to defy all odds, it would have been Steven Grant Rogers. 

How he'd survived wasn't irrelevant, but she didn't care about it right now. He had and people like Howard and Doctor Wakefield could figure out the details. But what had his life been like since, what could his _mind_ be like that he'd be capable of The American's resume of brutal killings? Zola hadn't been the only one working on mind-altering, mind- _controlling_ drugs. She'd heard plenty about that during her two years in Lawrence, about coercion 'therapy,' about all the different ways drugs could be used in combination with outright torture to mold a mind like clay. The body Abraham Erskine had given him to match his peerless heart would be used to betray that heart. They could do so much damage to it in service of warping his mind and know that he'd survive it. As he had. 

If she'd had any tears left, she'd have wept anew for him. 

"Barnes should be home by three," Howard told her at breakfast. Because he was good for his word and of course he'd checked. "I have to go be a a suit for a few hours, but I'll be back here by then and we'll go out, if that's what you still want to do." 

She paused the spreading of marmalade on buttered bread baked fresh this morning by Mrs. Jarvis. "He deserves to know."

"Absolutely," Howard agreed, waving away her protest with a strip of bacon. "But I might suggest that that's not the only thing he's told at the time." 

Peggy focused on the marmalade pot again, not missing what Howard was prompting her to say. "I think we should use him," she said. "I think he'll want to be used."

She thought about the visits to the cemetery in Brooklyn, about the anger and guilt that time and three children by a lovely wife had not washed away. 

"Are you sure?" Howard picked up his coffee cup. "He's got different priorities now, Peg. He agreed to the testing for his kids' sake, not to help us find Steve. And asking him to chase down a super-powered monster of a killer just because that monster used to be his best friend... Even if he wants to do it, is this something we should be asking of him? SHIELD has other resources and now that we know who he is and what he looks like... "

Peggy put the marmalade spoon down. "He's still a 'super-powered monster of a killer,' Howard. And sending the closest thing we have to our own super-soldier might be the only way to stop him. To _save_ him without racking up a terrible body count of our own." 

Unless the very act of hearing his own name broke the Soviets' conditioning, sending SHIELD agents (or CIA agents or even soldiers) up against The American would be like restaging the Battle of Isandlwana or one of the cavalry charges from the Great War -- an invitation to mass slaughter. Steve had been a vicious fighter when in his own mind, far more lethal and ruthless than history and the newsreels would have anyone believe. But what he'd done as The American was so much worse, so much more savage. Sending Barnes up against that was not a trivial request, but he'd been a soldier once and a good one and if he could be a near peer to Steve physically and had the best chance of shaking his memories loose, then it was not an option they could overlook. When Steve returned to them, they'd apologize later. 

Howard didn't look convinced. "You're going to have to run all this by the Director and the Board. Maybe do that first and then go see Barnes when you have an answer. This is the kind of news that'll keep. Let him have one more day before we cave everything in."

In the end, it took six days before she and Howard made the trip out to Woodside to see Bucky Barnes. In the interim, she had been summoned down to DC to give her news to the Director face-to-face and then several days of meetings to determine a course of action. A course of action that changed once it became clear that both the SDECE and SIS were aware of the connection between their cases and that their prime suspect was a Soviet agent passing himself off as American. Which then put SHIELD in the position of having to relive the Izzy Goldman shame while also emphatically denying that Goldman had been given any variant of the serum or had known where to get some before he'd defected. The CIA wanted the case and would have gotten it except that SHIELD's director pulled one desperate trump card: in a private meeting with both President Truman and President-Elect Eisenhower, he told the men who the American really was and how they'd figured it out. There were more inter-agency accusations after that, of course, and a whole lot of practical arguments that got beaten to death and then driven over once more, but the result was that every spy agency in the West was now gunning for The American and Peggy had authority to conscript James Barnes back into service to save Steve Rogers before they could pull a trigger. 


	4. Bucky

Bucky was in the bathroom shaving when the doorbell rang. He didn't pause in the stroke of the razor, although Matty, who'd been sitting on the toilet seat lid watching him, turned at the noise. 

"You want to go see who it is?" he asked his son after he brought the razor over his chin. Matty looked conflicted for a moment, then grinned and shook his head no and Bucky's heart grew a size as he returned the smile. If Judy was the measuring stick to go by, he had maybe another year before Daddy stopped being the most interesting person in the world for his elder son. He reached out with the bristle brush and dabbed Matty's nose with soap foam, getting him to laugh and wipe at it. Best enjoy it while it lasted. 

He didn't think too much about who could be at the door; it was almost two in the afternoon and it might be anyone from the neighbors to the mailman with a Christmas package to Father Murphy coming by to see if Molly could possibly bake something extra for one of the holiday events. Or something else entirely; the house during the day was Molly's domain and Bucky'd be the first to admit that he had no idea what went on while he was at work save for what she told him. And that hadn't changed for all that he'd been home during the day all week, albeit sleeping. He'd been working nights, the first time in years; draft numbers came up and guys traded one uniform for another, but while there were new hires, someone who knew what they were doing had to be on every train and it wasn't going to be the guys who were closer to their twenty than Bucky was. It wasn't as bad as it couldn't have been, although he'd been grateful for the assurance that this wasn't going to be a regular thing. He didn't have a problem falling asleep in daylight; nobody who'd been in the Army did. But staying asleep was a lot harder now than it had been when he'd been one of the greenhorns stuck working nights. Back then, he'd still been living in his parents' home and courting Molly over breakfasts that had been dinners for him; now they had three kids running around -- two in the morning with Judy in kindergarten -- and peace was a precious commodity. 

As if on cue, Judy started stomping up the stairs calling for him; the baby had just gone down for his nap and it was even odds that the noise would set him to crying again. With one ear for that, Bucky finished the last swipes at the cleft in his chin and reached for the washcloth as Judy appeared in the doorway. 

"Miss Carter is here to see you," she reported, pushing at Matty's foot because he'd tried to kick at her. "She brought a man with her. Hey!"

The last had been directed at Matty, who'd connected on a second attempt. Bucky'd dropped the razor in the sink in surprise at the news, but now he recovered and separated the two kids before it could escalate. His heart had sped up at the thought of the man being Steve, whom Judy wouldn't recognize (and he hurt at that), but dismissed the thought as unlikely at best and there'd probably have been more noise from downstairs if it had been him. He couldn't imagine who else it could be, but there really weren't any good options because he'd hoped he'd seen the last of Peggy Carter back in the fall. She'd been Steve's girl and he'd have accepted her into his world for that alone if she'd come into it on those terms, but she hadn't, had stayed far away until she'd needed him as Agent Carter, and the circumstances weren't ever not going to matter. 

"Tell Ma that I'll be down as soon as I'm dressed," he told her while he used the hand not holding the washcloth to keep Matty out of kicking range. "Tell her quietly, not shouting from the staircase, yeah? Stevie's sleeping." 

Matty looked smug as Judy left, no longer splitting their father's attention, and Bucky frowned at him. "What was that for?" he asked, knowing that there would be no answer except maybe a shrug. Matty was old enough to be jealous, but not old enough to articulate it; the baby's arrival three months ago had changed the natural order of things as far as Matty understood them. He wasn't acting out the way Judy had when Matty had been born, at least not toward the baby (his sister was another matter), but he wasn't happy at losing the lion's share of his parents' attention and all of the emphasizing the promotion to 'big brother' wasn't going to make up for it. Judy, for her part, had gotten over her disappointment at the baby not being a little sister or a puppy and would tell everyone who asked that the new little brother wasn't very exciting at all. 

He chivvied Matty out of the bathroom and past the boys' thankfully still-quiet bedroom and on to his own; Matty climbed on to the bed and Bucky went over to where Molly had left his undershirt and the top half of his uniform hanging neatly pressed. He usually went down to eat in just his undershirt, but he dressed fully now, checking his tie after buttoning the vest but before he put on his jacket. 

"Let's go, buddy," he told Matty, who was making snow angels on the sheets, rumpling the made bed. He picked up his son with one arm and gave the sheets a straightening yank with his free hand and headed downstairs. He put Matty on the ground once they reached the bottom of the staircase, but Matty didn't run off and stayed by his side. 

The hallway that led to the living room also went to the kitchen and he could see Molly there, measuring coffee into the percolator's basket. She'd have made the little pot for him, but company required the bigger one, already on the stove top heating up the water. She shot him a look once she realized he was there, worried and surprised both, and he shrugged back with a grimace. He had no idea what this was about and wasn't particularly eager to find out. 

"Have you been a good enough boy for chocolate milk?" Molly asked Matty, who of course nodded yes, although he looked up at his father for a confirming nod before going into the kitchen to receive his reward. Molly directed him to the kitchen table before looking back at Bucky with a reassuring smile. Whatever happened, she'd still be here. 

On the list of people he ever expected to see sitting in his living room, Howard Stark was not very high on the list. But there he was, animatedly telling Judy about what it was like to fly an airplane and how soon every airplane would fly with jet engines and go even faster than they did now. Peggy had been looking on, but she saw Bucky enter and stood. Stark finished what he'd been saying to Judy, then did the same. 

Whatever this was, it wasn't good news. 

"Judy," Molly called from the kitchen with her impeccable timing. "Please come help me peel vegetables, love?"

Judy was old enough to smell a scam and appealed to her father with an imploring look. He gestured with his head toward the kitchen, though. "Tell Ma I said you could have a cookie."

The bribe didn't quite cover it, but she went and he ruffled her hair as she passed, getting a little comfort from it. He crossed the rest of the room to where Stark and Peggy had been parked on the couch next to the christmas tree and he gestured for them to resume their seats, which they did and he followed in one of the chairs. 

Up close, Peggy looked... off. She was perfectly made up and everything was in place, but there was something scattered and unsettled about her nonetheless. How unsettled Stark was, he couldn't tell because they'd never associated without extreme duress. He'd met Stark in '43 when he'd been rescued, but the last time had been in '48, when they'd declared Steve dead and had the state funeral down in DC; it didn't make for much sense of normal with the man.

"We've identified the super-soldier," Peggy began without preamble, eyes on her hands folded in her lap before she suddenly met Bucky's gaze. With a sudden, sick feeling, he knew exactly what she was going to say before she said it. "It's Steve."

The words still came like a blow, like a punch to the gut. "How?" he got out in barely a whisper. 

How could he be alive? How could he be ripping the heads off of diplomats instead of coming home to the people who loved him? How was any of this _possible _?__

"We don't know," Stark answered, leaning forward as if to take the brunt of whatever Bucky threw at them instead of Peggy. Whom Bucky knew well enough to know she had socked guys for less, but that she let him do it here, leaned back into the couch instead, spoke volumes. "We don't know how he survived, how the Russians got him, or how they're keeping him."

Bucky shook his head, as if to clear cobwebs that were obscuring the part that made sense. But things were no clearer. "Then how do you know it's him?" 

When he'd gone back to Lehigh for the second round of testing, he'd had Wendell explain the results of the first round to him as best he could. Most of what he'd heard had scared him, although he'd gotten the impression that he should have been pleased instead. But he didn't care about whatever potential his body had and he certainly hadn't wanted to know that, barring accident, he would outlive his wife by decades and probably his children -- who had possibly inherited some of what Zola had done to him -- as well. But what had been a bizarre kind of comfort was knowing that all of the things they'd found out about him meant that the mystery super-soldier didn't have to be Steve. Especially if Zola had created more than one monster. 

But it didn't matter what Zola had done, or what Bucky had done for this cause, because apparently it had been Steve all along. 

"We know it's him because of this." Peggy reached for her purse and pulled out a plastic sleeve that held a folded piece of paper. She slid it out and handed it over. 

It was waxy paper, like the kind he got sandwiches in, and it had grease stains and he wondered what they thought he'd get out it. Steve fingerprints in mustard, maybe. But then he unfolded it and he understood immediately even without mustard. 

"The American's latest kill was at the Hotel Metropole," Peggy explained in a steady voice. The same hotel drawn in Steve's hand on the paper; it could be nobody else's unless someone had put real effort into a fake. The lines were all familiar and Steve had always drawn the same little zig-zag faces when the people weren't the subject of his drawing, like the people walking on the street here. And none of them had feet because Steve had hated drawing feet. "This was drawn by a man roughly meeting Steve's description in the hours before the murders."

He re-folded the drawing and handed it back. "So what happens now? How do you get him back? Call up Stalin and tell him we want our hero back?" 

Molly came in on silent feet carrying a tray with coffee cups and saucers, the good ones but not the fancy china, and the sugar bowl and creamer, and put it down on the coffee table along with a trivet for the coffee pot, which would need a second trip. He moved to get up to help, but Molly put her hand on his shoulder to keep him where he was, squeezing lightly, before heading off. 

Peggy leaned forward to sort cups and saucers and Bucky didn't know if it was to delay answering the question or to wait for Molly. He didn't think they had any illusion that he wouldn't tell her. 

Molly brought the coffee in the perk pot and a plate of sugar cookies that looked too festive for the occasion; he noticed that these were ones she'd decorated, leaving the more creative ones Judy had done for family consumption. Coffee was served out, although Molly didn't take, and she stood beside Bucky's chair afterward, hand back on his shoulder, and waited. 

"Steve's alive," he told her and the hand on his shoulder squeezed as he could see her own shocked reaction. He felt his eyes burn in anticipation of tears and fought them off, smiling so that she wouldn't cry, either. "He's alive and he's killing people for the Commies and Agent Carter and Mister Stark were about to tell me how they're going to get him back."

The answer was not what he'd have anticipated, although in hindsight he shouldn't have been surprised. Once they'd broken their promise to Steve to leave him alone, they might as well not waste the sin and go all the way. And they had. 

"You want to send me after him?" he cut off what had been a long-winded way of saying just that. "To hunt Steve down like a dog or to serve as bait?"

It had sounded like both, to turn him into the the monster -- the _super-soldier_ \-- Zola had always wanted him to be and then set him loose against Steve, in what capacity carefully undefined. 

"We don't want _anyone_ hunting Steve down like a dog," Peggy assured. "That's why we're here, so there is another option. Every spy agency and security service outside the Iron Curtain knows what The American is and what he's done, even if they don't know who he is. We want to bring him home before someone gets lucky and kills him. We want him to live through this."

"And what about my husband?" Molly asked angrily. Her accent, always stronger when she was worked up, gave her words an extra edge. "Do ye want him to live through this, too? Or will he be 'acceptable collateral damage' if it means the return of Captain America?" 

_Was he part of the cost of bringing Steve back to Peggy_ , Molly didn't say, but everyone heard it just fine. 

Peggy looked hurt and offended, but it was Stark who spoke up. "Steve would never forgive us if we let that happen, Mrs. Barnes. He'd consider it a price too high for the purchase."

But Steve wasn't in his own mind right now and had no concept of the cost of anything to do with Bucky Barnes. 

"You promised him you'd keep Bucky safe," Molly shot back. "Sending him after a murderous savage with superpowers isn't that."

Peggy and Stark had the decency to look ashamed because this was a violation of that promise in a way bringing him in for testing hadn't been. 

There was a shriek (Judy's) from the kitchen and then an answering shout (Matty) and Molly turned and left to go keep the kids from tearing up the place up, giving him an angry look -- not angry at him -- before going. 

Bucky returned his attention to Stark and Peggy. "So how is this supposed to play out?" he asked. "Are you counting on my history with Steve to snap him out of whatever trance the Russians have him in? Am I supposed to find him and talk to him about the good old days until he remembers who he is and we both come home for egg creams? Are there actual details to this plan or did you just hope that it would be like Daniel and the lion's den and I'd emerge unharmed because of what Zola did to me? Like that was a _blessing_?" 

He didn't realize until he'd heard his own voice how _angry_ he was, how resentful. These people showing up and tearing apart his life, tearing apart everything he knew about himself and everything he'd told himself was true so he could get through the day. Stark was a genius, Peggy was a super-spy, and they had thousands of people and millions of dollars at their disposal and yet they couldn't come up with a better plan than him. He hadn't been a soldier in nine years, hadn't ever been a super-soldier no matter what their lab tests said. He hadn't ever wanted to be either of those things, be part of that world, not once he'd understood what it meant. 

He'd been so angry at Steve, who had not only fought to be both soldier and super-soldier, but had also embraced his new identity with his whole heart, eager to race for the front lines, eager to be Captain America the hero and not the movie star, even after he'd seen what sort of hell war really was. "The serum's made you big, but it's made you stupid, too," he'd told Steve when Steve had told him of his plans and how he'd achieve them. "You saved four hundred guys, that's enough for anyone. Get back on stage before they expect you to save a thousand or die trying."

But Steve hadn't needed other people to expect that of him; he'd expected it of himself. And the first of that thousand was going to be Bucky Barnes, whether or not he wanted it for himself. He'd been so very angry at Steve for the bargain he'd struck, for deciding on his own that Bucky shouldn't fight at his side, for never asking him if he wanted to be a Howling Commando and instead acting like he was an invalid who needed special protection. Steve had called it payback for their childhood, but it wasn't because Bucky had never treated Steve like someone who couldn't make his own decisions.

(He would have said yes, if Steve had asked. Not because he wanted to see another second of war, he didn't, but because someone was going to need to be there when Steve realized what he'd gotten himself into and put the pieces back together. And that person turned out to be Izzy fucking Goldman, who'd rebuild Steve as a perfect soldier, a perfect killer, and look where that got everyone now. Goldman, before he'd been a traitor, had been a hard man, a ruthless man, and he'd taught Steve what he knew. Had Bucky been there instead, he'd have had to teach Steve dark things, too, because war needed that, but he'd have done a better job of keeping the blood off of Steve's hands.)

But Steve treating him like a baby hadn't been angry about that -- or not _just_ about that. And by the time he'd really understood what he'd been angry at, Steve was gone and he'd never had a chance to explain. To explain that he'd been angry at what had happened to him during the war even before being captured. He'd been angry and then terrified by the changes he'd seen in himself beyond the physical: the nightmares, the nervousness, the way everything around him that had once been comforting and wanted was now not. He'd been angry at how little actual difference there had been between his and Steve's paths, but that his own had run entirely through darkness while Steve had only seen the sun. It wasn't jealousy of Steve, not at all, but it had just been his own pain finding voice in the only words he could bear to say. 

These hadn't been sudden realizations; he'd had years at Steve's gravesite in East Flatbush to work it out, piece by piece. He'd explained himself to Steve in ways he'd never have been able to if Steve had been standing there. 

Stark and Peggy were offering him a chance to do that now, but Bucky honestly wasn't sure he was ready to pay that price.

"We were hoping to use both your history with Steve and your physical advantages, yes," Peggy said. "But with slightly more preparation than attaching you to a fishing line and reeling you both in once Steve bit."

She gave an overview that was still really vague at points that probably weren't important to her but were damned important to him. They wanted him to start training at Lehigh -- they'd fix it so that he didn't lose his job with the railroad -- so that when they figured out where Steve was, they could send him there and have a reasonable expectation that he'd come home alive. It assumed so much, both of their own ability to find Steve when they'd been looking for him for months and then what Bucky was willing to do to make himself ready and available. This could go on for months, for _years_ even, and how long was he supposed to go to Jersey and pretend to be a spy? Even the guys who'd been sent to Korea weren't going to be there forever, but what about him? 

Peggy looked startled at his question about an end date, a point at which they let him go back to his life and looked for Steve without him. 

"I would think 'until we find Steve' would be a sufficient deadline," she told him sharply. "Or would you rather him languish in this horrifying captivity so you can get back to punching tickets? That wasn't Steve's choice when it was you." 

"Peggy," Stark warned, but Bucky cut him off. 

"If you'd come to me in '45, I'd have dropped anything and everything to look for him," he said, letting his anger show. "I'd have taken any risk. I'd have died to save him and I wouldn't have had a single regret. But this isn't '45. It's 1952, what's left of it, and Steve can't be my first priority anymore. I have a family I need to take care of and I can't drop everything to run off after him like there's nothing waiting for me back here. Nobody _depending_ on me for the food in their mouths, the clothes on their backs, and the roof over their heads. 

"This is what you do, this is your life, and if you've got anything outside of it, I don't know you well enough to ask. But you don't know me, either, except as numbers on a lab report that those ghouls at Lehigh turned out when they were treating me like a fancy piece of equipment some other manufacturer had produced. Maybe I _am_ a piece of equipment as far as you go and you really think that all you need to do is requisition it for as long as you want to hold on to it, until you figure out what you want to use it for or it gets destroyed and you have to order a new one. Maybe this just another draft in just another war and you're holding my number. 

"But this isn't _anything_ like me and Steve back then and if you think Steve would be okay with me abandoning my family to go get killed chasing him down, then you don't remember him as well as you think you do."

There was a moment when Bucky thought Peggy was going to storm out, maybe hoped a little that she would, but while she put down her cup with more force than required -- if carefully less than enough to damage it -- she held her ground. He didn't know if it was because she didn't like someone else getting the last word or because she simply needed him too badly. 

"The idea remains to _not_ get you killed, Mister Barnes," Stark said into the tense silence. Peggy continued to glare at her cup on the table. "For more reasons than that it would break Steve's heart. And you're right. We have assumed more than we should have about your participation and our planning has been cavalier with your time and your responsibilities. But please believe me, we are not being cavalier with your life."

Stark looked over at Peggy, who'd raised her head and schooled her features to neutral, before going on. "We can use our own resources to find him and we will, but once we do, what happens after that... You are the best option we have, the best option we could hope for to bring him back alive. Not only because you are the best equipped, physically, to survive an encounter with a super-soldier, which matters more than you realize. But also -- more importantly -- because you are going to be the one who waits the longest to say that it can't be done."

It took Bucky a moment to realize what Stark was saying, but when he did, he looked straight at Peggy, who looked straight back and let him see the fear and the grief she'd been trying to hide. 

"You want me to bring him back if I can or kill him if I can't," he said softly, his anger bleeding out into something like horror.

Peggy nodded once. "We will get only one chance to bring him home," she answered, a faint smile on her lips before it disappeared. "Once the Soviets know we've figured out who he really is, they'll hide him where we'd never get to him again. Keeping him active behind the Iron Curtain wouldn't be enough; we'd find him eventually. They'll do something more drastic. I don't think they'll kill him, not when they haven't cracked the serum, but they can make him -- and us -- wish they had. If they're capable of doing what they've already done, imagine what they would do to keep from losing him and the potential of his body, losing the punchline to the best joke of the Cold War. What they would do to keep from getting caught." 

Bucky didn't want to imagine; he already knew he was going to have nightmares from his own captivity when next he tried to sleep. How much worse than his own hell was Steve's? 

"If we get only one chance, then we have to make it the best chance," she went on, the smile returning but full of sadness. "And that remains you. A prepared you, not as chum for a shark, but as the fittest, most compassionate, best _person_ we could hope for to rescue a man we all hold dear. And if you can't, if what they've done to him is too hard to undo, if it is going to cost more than you can bear to continue, then I will have full faith in your judgment. And we will both return to our lives knowing that nothing more could have been done, no greater measure given. And we will have to take our comfort in that he will be free of them, if not in the manner we would have wished."

They sat there in a far less tense but just as heavy a silence as before. Bucky felt weighed down by it, by the enormity of what Peggy had said. They were, very literally, putting Steve's life in his hands, and he didn't know how to carry it. It wasn't like when he'd held his children for the first time, the love and urge to protect overwhelming him. It wasn't like how it had been when he'd had his target lined up through his sniper scope in the army, the power of death in his trigger finger. It wasn't like any of a million times he'd waded in to something Steve had started because Steve's desires had once again outweighed his capacity and his common sense. It was something else entirely and uncomfortable for it.

Peggy stood up and Bucky and Howard followed suit.

"Clearly, we have much to work out with the details of our preparations," she said, a wry look on her face, but then she sobered. "Going forward, we shall do our best to... minimize the impact on your family. I cannot promise that you won't be taken away from them at some point. In fact, I can guarantee that you will. But the plan will _always_ be to return you to them."

With nothing to say to that, Bucky nodded and when Peggy made move to edge around the coffee table in front of him, he gestured for her to precede him and walked them to the front door, helping Peggy on with her coat. Judy came out of the kitchen to watch and Stark slipped her a half-dollar coin as 'payment' for holding his hat while he buttoned his coat, warning her to be good because Santa was absolutely making his final lists.

He watched them walk toward a late-model Hudson Commodore parked down the block before closing the door.

"You'd better put that in your piggy bank before you lose it," he told Judy, who was clutching the fifty-cent piece in her hand. She starting stomping up the stairs again and he told her not to do that before heading back to the kitchen.

Molly was at the stove frying eggs when he got there and he paused to kiss her cheek before going over to the table, which had been set for his breakfast before their guests had arrived. Matty was sitting in his booster seat and 'reading' the paper out loud; apparently Mayor Impellitteri's new plan for the city involved blue cars that were driven by cats that ate cookies. It was all completely normal -- or at least what passed as normal in his home -- and it was both comforting and strange after what had just happened.

Steve was _alive_.

"They weren't asking, were they?" Molly asked as she slid the eggs and sausages on to his plate.

"No, I don't think they were," he agreed, reaching over to retrieve the butter dish from where it had gotten perilously close to Matty's hands and then leaning back so Molly could bring over toast and more coffee. "I don't think I get to say no here."

Molly slid into the seat between him and Matty, giving their son a sliver of toast run through the sausage grease left in the frying pan.

"Would you if you could?"

He was saved from answering first by having his mouth full and then by Judy hollering from upstairs that the baby was awake. By the time Stevie was brought downstairs wearing a fresh diaper and a still-sleepy expression, the O'Connor twins had rang the doorbell looking for Judy to come out and play and Matty had to be stopped from sucking the newsprint off of his fingers. There was no more 'adult conversation' to be had, but Bucky didn't think Molly had forgotten the question. Nor had he, but now he had time to think about his answer. Or he would, at some point before dawn.

The trains were hectic well past the point that the evening rush hour usually started to peter out -- tourists, holiday shoppers, the regular crowd of folks going to and from work. It was office party season and there were more pickled folks getting poured into their seats than usual, half of them with something more in their hands to continue the festivities on to points east. Getting them off the train at their stop required finesse, especially when he was working the 8:49 to Port Washington where half the stations on the line didn't platform all of the cars and "walk back for Murray Hill" became a great adventure for someone on their fifth gin and tonic.

But things slowed down before midnight and the overnight service was so infrequent that the dinner break could be stretched an extra twenty minutes before someone had to go saddle up to ride to Hempstead. He'd spent most of the meal teaching the new guys a few tricks for handling the drunks on New Year's Eve -- he had enough seniority to stay the hell away from work that night -- but his first run after was to deadhead a train out to Babylon and he'd gotten a car to himself to sit and think.

He didn't know the answer to Molly's question. He didn't want to -- could not -- abandon his domestic responsibilities for Steve. His kids didn't just need his salary to keep them in diapers and Ovaltine; they needed _him_. Molly needed him. And Steve, who'd lost his own father so young, would understand that.

But he couldn't do nothing. It wasn't that he didn't trust anyone else to find Steve or keep him safe; whatever else he thought of Peggy Carter, he didn't think she'd do anything less than her best there even if it wasn't best for anyone but Steve. But on his own, he owed it to Steve to do something. Not as payback for rescuing him from HYDRA, but instead because it's what they had always done for each other without keeping score. Once upon a time Steve had been closer to him than his own brother and his death had never stopped hurting; this was worse than death and knowing that Steve was out there, maybe trapped in his own body or maybe not even there anymore at all and instead a stranger was wearing his face and destroying everything he'd ever stood for...

When he pictured Steve in his mind, it was always the guy he'd known, short and scrawny, and not Captain America. Captain America was a movie star, a hero for the newsreels and the history books. Bucky had only seen the 'new' Steve up close a couple of times, when Steve had rescued him and then in '45, a month or so before the plane had gone down, when Steve had made it back to New York for a couple of days. There'd been letters back and forth and even a surprise phone call Christmas of '44, but Steve had sounded the same in those as he always had. And so for Bucky, the shrimpy Steve was still the real one and that's whose grave he visited at Holy Cross Cemetery in Brooklyn, not the shrine to Captain America down at Arlington. That man could never have torn the head clean off a body, could never have wanted to, and no power on earth would have made him.

But something had. And the same protective instinct that now kept watch over Molly and the kids, that had been honed looking after Steve and two too-smart sisters and a baby brother nobody had ever expected to wind up on the same side of the police handcuffs as the key, that instinct reached out now. Someone, somehow, had broken Steve so badly that he couldn't pull himself together again. And no matter what else, part of Bucky was always going to want to run to fix it. 

When he got home in the morning, the house was suspiciously quiet.

"Helen picked Judy and Matty up last night and took them to your parents," Molly told him as she came downstairs in her housecoat. "I told them you just needed a chance to sleep."

He nodded as he hung up his overcoat and then followed Molly into the kitchen. She made him a sandwich and tea for herself and they just enjoyed the quiet, the ability to sit for more than two bites without an interruption. Stevie would make his presence known sooner than later, but right now, it was peaceful.

"We got a card from the Martins in the mail today," Molly said as she fiddled with her mug.

John Martin had been his mentor when he'd first started out on the LIRR. Years later, after Bucky had graduated from brakeman to conductor, Martin had been on board the ill-fated #175 when it had crashed into another train at Rockville Centre. There'd been dozens killed, over a hundred wounded, and Martin had been lucky enough to limp away with only a dislocated knee. It had been a harbinger; 1950 had been a bad year on the railroad, three big smash-ups and Rockville Centre hadn't even been the worst of them.

From Molly's expression, she'd maybe been thinking about that, too.

"I've been told a dozen times that I'm lucky you come home every night, that you're not in Korea," she said softly. "That I don't have to sit at home worrying and waiting that the doorbell's going to ring with a priest and an officer on the other side of it. But you're not safe here, not really. Just safer."

She was working her way toward something, so he waited.

"I'm selfish for wanting you to stay, for wanting to tell Peggy Carter to go find someone else. Put someone else's husband at risk, someone else's father. You fought in your war and, my God, you gave them enough. They _took_ enough and then they took more when they made you go through those tests.

"But I can't ask you to stay, can I?" She looked up at him and he could see tears in her eyes. "It wouldn't be fair to you and it wouldn't be fair to Steve. I can't ask you to turn your back on him. But I am so afraid that they won't be as careful with you as they should be. They've given little proof so far that they're capable of it."

He didn't bother denying any of it. He reached across the table for her hand, rubbing her fingers with his thumb.

"It'll be better than last time," he said and she frowned at him. "Last time, I was cannon fodder, one of a million men sent far away to fight. This time, they'll have to look me in the eyes before they send me over the top. It makes a difference."

Whether it would make enough difference, he didn't know. But as callous as Peggy could be and frankly had been when it came to the testing and to the brow-beating about not wanting to help Steve, he didn't think she was heartless enough, when push came to shove, to ask him to die for Steve. It might happen anyway, without intent or planning, but he didn't think she'd send him to it. She was still the woman Steve had fallen in love with and, however much she'd changed since his disappearance, he still trusted Steve's judgment. Enough, apparently, to stake his life on it. 

Molly lifted up his hand and kissed his palm before standing. "I want him home, God knows, I want him home so that he can be free of those monsters. But I can't not be terrified of what you'll need to do to get that." 

When the kids had been home, Bucky had spent time with them in the mornings, supervising breakfast or reading or playing a game, the sorts of things he did with them in the evenings on his regular work schedule. But today, with Judy and Matty off in Brooklyn, he was almost at loose ends. He could sit and read the paper or his book in actual uninterrupted peace, but instead he ended up following Molly upstairs when she went to take care of the baby, who was protesting his current circumstances with a shrillness that rivaled Bucky's train whistle. 

Stevie, dark-haired and pudgy, looked nothing like his namesake. But his default expression was one of deep suspicion and that, everyone in the Barnes family agreed, would not have looked out of place on 'big' Steve. It was the same expression Steve would make if he thought you were putting him on and it made Bucky smile to see it on his tiny son. Made him choke up a little too, sometimes. He stayed by the bassinet after Molly put Stevie back down, letting his son grab at his finger with tiny, perfect hands until he started to doze again. 

Molly was in their bedroom when he got there, rooting through her drawers to get dressed for the day. 

"Stay a while?" he asked and she arched her eyebrow at him, but she was smiling and closed the drawer without removing any underthings. Between the baby and the kids and the flip in his schedule, they'd had trouble finding the time and the energy. But they had enough of both now and as much as he wanted her, he also just wanted to be near her. The world was a better place when he was next to her and, right now, he needed it to be. 

Afterward he held her close, breathing in the scent of her hair, half-drowsing, but his thoughts ran around in his head until he had to give them form. 

"The answer is yes," he said softly near her ear. "I don't know what kind of man that makes me, to want to go back out there, to do that to you. I'm not... I'm not choosing him over you, over the kids. I meant what I told them; I can't put him first, I don't _want_ to put him first, not over you and the kids. But I can't leave him there. He doesn't have anyone else. I couldn't live with myself knowing I'd turned my back on him when he'd needed me." 

Molly pulled his arm tighter around her. "I know."

The question of what SHIELD was going to ask of him -- demand of him -- cast a little bit of a shadow over the holidays, but didn't spoil them. The kids going nuts with their presents was enough to outshine anything, at least for the morning. But it was hard to sit with his family at his parents' place for Christmas dinner, with his siblings and all of their kids, and not say anything about Steve being alive because of course he came up in conversation. His namesake might be sleeping in the other room, but he'd been a fixture at the Barnes table for Christmas since he'd been ten, first with his mother and then on his own. There was still a chestnut pie on the menu every year because that's what Sarah Rogers had brought. This was Steve's family, too, and keeping this secret burned a hole in Bucky's chest. When his father made a toast to Steve, he raised his glass but looked to Molly, who smiled back sadly. 

A couple of days later, he got a call from Howard Stark asking him to stop by Stark's mansion after work to talk about "a project." He'd been there once before, in '45 when Steve had been back to New York. Stark had been having some kind of shindig and Steve had asked him (and thus also Molly) to come along. Steve had made it sound like he'd need a pal for moral support, but he hadn't, he'd been in Captain America showgirl mode and had smiled and slapped backs and shook hands like he'd been running for president. It had been Bucky who'd been glad to have a friend along in Molly because watching Steve had been disturbing, to see Steve's face on a still-strange body, to see absolutely nothing of the pal he'd always known in the man circulating the room in his dress uniform with a champagne flute always in his hand. At least until near the end, when Bucky'd been about to escort Molly back home, and Steve had come up to them with the mask dropped and had sighed with exhaustion and asked if they'd wanted to go grab a sandwich somewhere so he could talk to real people and eat real food. It had been the last time they'd seen each other and two months later Steve had died, or so they'd thought. 

This time around, there were no borrowed cufflinks or passed hors d'ouevres, although Bucky was pretty sure the butler was the same. Stark was downstairs in a room that looked like someone had parked a high school chemistry lab inside a shooting range and smelled of both. Bucky wasn't nervous, more wary of what Stark and Peggy had come up with and he wondered if she'd be there, too. But she wasn't there and Stark looked like he hadn't been expecting guests, wearing a smock over an undershirt with an ashtray and a tumbler of booze to hand as he fiddled with something under a magnifying glass, startling when the butler announced Bucky. 

"The problem is not training you," Stark began after the pleasantries had been quickly dispensed with and Bucky had accepted a drink but turned down a cigarette; he'd sometimes take one to be social, usually at work, but he didn't smoke on his own anymore because whatever Zola had done to him had taken away the rush of the nicotine. "You're a bright fellow and SHIELD, by now, has figured out how not to dim that kind of light. The problem is deploying you without making it completely obvious to everyone, including the Soviets -- who will be watching -- why you're being deployed. Figuring this out has been just as hard -- and just as important -- as figuring out where Steve is. Fortunately, while we still have no idea where our erstwhile Star Spangled Man is hanging his cowl these days, I've got an idea for you." 

Stark held up a rifle that almost bore more resemblance to the HYDRA blasters he'd seen than the Garand or Springfield he'd carried during the war. "This is the SI-24, currently operating under the _nom d'examination_ of T-51 as far as the Infantry Board goes. They are holding an Olympic Games masquerading as a competition for a new service rifle for the Army and I'm up against John Garand's latest and a French confection that, unsurprisingly, fares best in conditions that have nothing to do with shooting the damned things. Mine is the best and if the Board goes with anything else, it won't be because of quality, it'll be because they're cheap sons of bitches who'd rather save a few dollars than a few lives."

He held the rifle out to Bucky, holding it across the table. Bucky nearly dropped it for all that he'd been expecting it to weigh much more than it did. Stark smirked at him. 

"It's seven pounds three unloaded," he said as Bucky looked it over up close, the sleekness of it almost alien. It looked strange, ugly even, but also really _interesting_ because of that ugliness. The differences between it and the Springfield, which he'd ended up carrying for most of the war, were vast, starting with the lack of bolt action and the fact that this one had a telescopic sight that looked like it might actually be waterproofed and right on through to the body of the rifle. "Selective fire -- one round, three rounds, or empty the thirty-round clip with a single trigger pull."

Bucky looked up. "Does it shoot straight?" 

Howard Stark was a genius inventor whose companies had produced half a dozen items in the Barnes household and twice that number of items on Bucky's wishlist of "if I had a million dollars." But Steve's letters had been full of some of Stark's less practical inventions and ideas, Steve having been asked to sketch out the plans, that had had plenty of features but couldn't actually perform their intended function. 

Stark's eyes widened, then narrowed. "Of course it shoots straight. The accuracy has outperformed both the T-44 and the T-48 consistently."

Bucky smiled, amused at the offense-taking and glad to get a little bit back so that he wasn't the only here less than perfectly at ease. "Then it's a nifty piece and I hope you win your contest," he said, holding the rifle out for Stark to take. 

Stark didn't accept it, instead gestured for Bucky to hold on to it. "That nifty piece is our explanation for why you're back in uniform." 

Bucky froze, smile gone. "Back in uniform?" 

Stark held up his hands. "Relax, you're not getting shipped off to Inchon. This is going to be strictly Stateside duty, at least until we find Steve. It's your cover and I happen to think it's a damned good one."

The butler -- Jarvis -- came into the room then to tell Stark that dinner was ready. Bucky wasn't sure if he was supposed to go, if Stark was going to tell Jarvis to come back later, or what, but Stark instead thanked him and told Bucky that it was assumed he'd stay for dinner and did he need to call home? He didn't -- he'd told Molly that whatever it was was probably going to take a while and if he wasn't home within a half-hour of his usual time, to assume he'd be late. 

He felt awkward going up to the main part of Stark's house, still wearing his work uniform. Stark didn't treat his house like it was fancy, but it was still a mansion with a butler and Bucky didn't hobnob with these kinds of people ever. He wasn't hobnobbing now, he supposed, but the uncertainty of the situation -- back in uniform? -- and the casual wealth on display made him edgy. 

But not nervous enough to lose his appetite, apparently. Over the start of a very nice meal that didn't seem to belong in a restaurant despite the fancy plates -- Molly was going to be disappointed that he didn't pay more attention to what he was eating so he could tell her about it -- Stark outlined his plans for Bucky. And they were his plans; Peggy would make it happen, but it had obviously been Stark's idea. 

"You were the top sharpshooter in the entire 107th," Stark explained. "You picked up two marksmanship citations in Africa before you even joined the 107th. And now you're a civil servant with a new mouth to feed and I need someone to test the sniper variant."

Bucky put down his fork with more force than necessary. "I can feed my family just fine, Mister Stark." 

Stark grimaced. "I didn't mean it like that," he said with a wince. "I've been in your home, I would never... It wasn't what I meant. I apologize. Where I was going was that, for your cover, having you return to the Army for the pay increase that would come with being assigned to my project team would be plausible."

Bucky did not pick up his fork. "Only to someone who didn't know me."

He wouldn't deny that an extra few dollars a week wouldn't hurt, but Molly and the kids had everything they needed and Stevie's arrival hadn't changed that much. He deeply resented the implication otherwise -- he didn't care what Stark had thought he'd meant. And who would believe that a man who'd been invalided out of the war after being a POW would want to put a uniform on again at all? Let alone anyone who actually knew him personally? That he'd sign up to go anywhere instead of staying at home where he could see his family and still provide for them was completely unlike anything he'd ever done, anything he'd ever been likely to do, and he was once again reminded that these people knew nothing about him that hadn't come out of his service record or the reports from Lehigh. 

"We can make it a conscription," Stark replied, waving away the point. "I'll play the bad guy, dragging you back into the service because of your record. You'll go along with it because the Army promised you Stateside duty, there is a pay enhancement for the duty because of the experimental nature of the weapons, and the rumors that I give generous off-the-record bonuses are true."

Bucky closed his eyes and took a deep breath before he said something he was going to regret. Such as that this was already a conscription and dressing it up with fancy dinners and cushy pretend duties didn't make it less so. When he opened his eyes again, Stark wasn't watching him for agreement or reaction, was instead reaching for the potatoes. Because this _was_ a conscription and his opinion didn't really matter. 

"The war is a fiasco, but it's also our best chance at a plausible reason for why you're doing something other than what you'd want to do, which is stay as far away from it as possible and stay home with your family," Stark went on. "You look young enough to possibly be draft eligible, which will work for the everyday, but your family wouldn't buy it and neither would the Soviets, who know damned well who you are and if they don't already have you under surveillance, they will soon."

Bucky had been picking up his fork again, but froze. "The Russians are watching me?" he asked, ready to drop everything and race back to Woodside to make sure Molly and the kids were okay, even though he knew that if something was going to happen, it would have happened already. 

"Not yet," Stark assured, realizing the consequences of what he'd said so casually. "They know who you are, they've always known who you are for the same reason everyone else has: you're the reason Steve went from showgirl to soldier. I'd like to think that they don't know the truth about what Zola did to you, but even if we'd managed to keep that secret within the SSR, Sergeant Goldman knew and we've always been acting on the assumption that he told them everything. If they ever did anything with the knowledge, we don't know about it, but nobody's been on you for years. That we do know." 

Bucky wasn't assuaged, especially when he connected the dots between what Stark was saying and what he wasn't. "So I'm going to pop back up on their radar the minute I switch this uniform for fatigues." 

Stark nodded, mouth full, and then swallowed. "I'd bet on it." 

Bucky pushed away from the table. "Then I'm done here. Done with this," he said as he stood up. "Me putting myself on the line for Steve, that's one thing and I've made my peace with that. But I won't put my family at risk, not when I'm not even going to be there to protect them."

It wasn't just Molly and the kids; it was his parents, it was Charlie and and Dottie and Helen and their families. If the Russians were watching them because of him and Steve, then none of them were safe. Not when the Russians had already shown how far they would go. This wasn't just asking his family to sacrifice a son and brother to the war -- too many other families had given more. This was putting all of them in _danger_ , a danger none of them understood or could protect themselves against. Even Charlie with all of his cop training and criminal instincts. He'd risk his own life for Steve, but not everyone else's. Not anyone else's. 

"Barnes," Stark sighed, putting down his fork and knife. "Nothing's going to happen to them. We won't _let_ anything happen to them. They won't be in danger because of this."

"How can you be so sure?" Bucky shot back. "After what they did to Steve, how can you be sure of what they'll do or not?" 

Stark smiled, a dark and almost sinister smile. "Because I've been dealing with them every single day since before the war ended," he replied. "Sit down, finish eating, and I'll tell you a story of secrets and lies and things that slither in the darkness." 

He gestured for Bucky to sit down and cocked an eyebrow when Bucky didn't immediately obey. But he wanted to know what Stark knew -- this danger wouldn't pass even if he quit right here -- and sat down. 

"Eat," Stark exhorted. "Mrs. Jarvis is only mild-mannered to those who enjoy at least partial membership in the Clean Plate Club."

Bucky had no appetite, was closer to being sick to his stomach, but he picked up his fork if it would get Stark to start talking. 

"Corporate espionage is a way of life when you run a successful business," Stark began, replacing his napkin in his lap and picking up his own fork. "Especially in industry and even more so when you make the tools of war in an era that has seen a lot of it. I'd prided myself on how well I'd done keeping my company's secrets and used my expertise to oversee the same when it came to Project Rebirth. But, to make a long story short, I was an arrogant ass and that arrogance cost me a dear friend, the world a genius of unparalleled kindness, and Abe Erskine his life. I've gotten a lot better at it since then. 

"Governments steal a lot more than they used to and nobody tries to steal more than the Soviets; the Worker's Paradise is much better at improving ideas than coming up with them. Something about the socialist collective stifles creativity, maybe the part where you don't get credit for your own ideas. Stalin's been sending waves of spies on to these shores since before we were enemies and they're generally easy to spot. Turncoats are always much harder to identify and that's where we've gotten in trouble, from Izzy Goldman to Alger Hiss to the dozen or so others we've got sneaking around. But we've gotten better at it, a lot better... I wasn't kidding about eating, Barnes. Jarvis does what I tell him to do because I pay him, but he obeys his wife for the same reason you do yours and he won't let you leave on an empty stomach." 

Bucky dutifully speared a piece of veal with his fork and put it in his mouth. He could eat without wanting to; he'd had the practice of it. 

Stark took a bite off his own plate before picking up his story. 

"The Soviets, both the agents they send and the turncoats they control here, operate in patterns that can be predicted because they are all ultimately given marching orders by the same folks in Moscow and those folks in Moscow are as human as anyone else. They think they've figured out what works and stick with it. Our secret is that we've figured out those patterns, more or less. The key is to keep them from realizing it. It's what we did with the Nazis after we cracked the Enigma code during the war and how we doubled every single one of their agents in Europe and then started inserting our own agents. We give them just enough victories so that they'll think they're winning without realizing that they've lost." 

A woman in an apron came into the dining room then and Stark held up his knife and fork as if to prove that he was, in fact, eating. Missus Jarvis, Bucky assumed, was maybe a few years older than he was and had an authority to her that he'd previously assigned to nuns and his mother on the warpath. He shoveled in another mouthful out of instinct. Satisfied, she nodded and disappeared back toward what was presumably the kitchen. 

Stark smirked knowingly. 

"The Russian soul may be a dramatic one, but Moscow Center is pragmatic at heart," he went on after a couple of minutes of dedicated eating. "They'll get no advantage to harming any member of the Barnes family, save possibly you. Your kids, your wife, your parents, your sisters, your brother, _their_ spouses and children, they don't not matter, but in the game of spies, they don't matter _much_. It wouldn't be a statement for them to be hurt, not the way your death would at least garner a headline, and they know that the cost would outweigh the benefit. 

"Anything happens to a member of the Barnes family -- or the Carter family across the sea, for that matter -- and Moscow Center can and will expect reprisals. It's how the game is played. And those reprisals wouldn't be the unfortunate death of some Politburo member's niece or son, it would be of a useful agent here in the US or in London or somewhere else where it would matter. Escalation is part of the deal. So they won't touch your children or your sisters or your cousins out in Indiana to get to you or to SHIELD. The cost would be too high." 

Stark paused to drain his wineglass. 

"So when I say that they'll be watching you and your family, that's what I mean and _all_ I mean. They'll be watching. They will probably go as far as trying to befriend someone you know, either your family or your friends or your colleagues at work or, more likely, all of the above and test your cover. They'll poke and prod to see if someone slips up and says that you're not doing what you look like you're doing, that sort of thing." Stark took another bite and Bucky did the same out of reflex. "So all we have to do is, firstly, make sure that your cover is solid and, secondly, keep a secret."

Stark reached out to the wine bottle to refill his glass and then stood and leaned over the table to refill Bucky's, which hadn't been quite empty but close enough. It was nice wine, better than the stuff he got at restaurants when he tried to order it. He wasn't drinking enough of it to matter, though, and he wished he could because dulling the edges might make this all easier to swallow. It was why soldiers and sailors used to be issued booze -- to make the life bearable. It was all going to happen as Stark wanted it to happen, that Bucky understood. He hadn't been a soldier for a while, but he understood orders when he heard them. How much of it he could influence, he wasn't sure. How much he could actually change, he could guess that it was almost nothing. But he wanted to hear it all anyway because understanding the spirit of the orders sometimes allowed you to follow them in a way that let you survive them; it was how he'd protected his boys once he'd made sergeant. He just wished he wasn't stone cold sober for this part. 

"We already know you can keep a secret," Stark continued once he'd sat down again. "And by maintaining that cover as well as we can, we'll make it even easier. I've been using Camp Lehigh for developmental testing of the T-51 for more than eight months; even when the Russkies follow you to New Jersey, they'll think nothing of it because that's where you are supposed to be going if you're on the testing squad. Lehigh itself isn't a high priority for the Soviets because it's mostly a training facility and they don't even bother with the rest of it after we shot the first few intruders and did terrible things with their remains." 

Bucky thought he was supposed to be horrified by this, but he wasn't. He wasn't necessarily comforted by what Stark had told him, either, but he could see the logic of it and, possibly more importantly, see the humanity behind it. Stark had taken Erskine's death personally -- Steve had been haunted by that murder until the end -- and the rest was a matter of ego. Stark would do a lot to avoid being proven wrong, which might matter more than the logic and the lessons learned. 

"You'll tell your family that you're going to Lehigh to shoot for me, which you will, in fact, be doing," Stark said as he mopped his plate with bread. "We'll tell your bosses that Uncle Sam has need of you and you'll tell everyone that it'll be a pay raise. Which it will be, for the record. The Army will give you a uniform and a paycheck, but we'll be making up the difference because SHIELD pays better than Uncle Sam does."

There was more, but it was comparatively minor, the aftershock long after the earthquake has shaken everything loose. As per the Army's wishes, they were sending him to the Infantry School at Fort Benning to relearn how to be a soldier; there was apparently a crash course for demobbed NCOs who'd either re-enlisted or got conscripted. After that, he'd spend a few weeks at Lehigh with a SHIELD training platoon to learn spy stuff; he'd be in the barracks during the week, but, unlike the cadets, he'd get to go home on the weekends. And finally, after that, he'd get to live at home and travel to Jersey as a fully-fledged member of Stark's rifle testing team while also working with the team that was hunting Steve. 

"Make no mistake," Stark assured as the plates were cleared away. "You will be firing thousands of rounds for me, same as the others. But if and when we need to send you out to bring Steve back, you'll be carrying the fruits of your labors: I'm designing the rifle to be purchased by the Infantry Board, but I'm also making one for you, to your specifications. It'll fit you better than your pajamas."

Bucky didn't bother pointing out that a bespoke rifle didn't make up for everything else. Not even a little.

When he got home, he repeated everything to Molly, including his own fears and the previously unconsidered threat of the Soviets watching them. Molly was more angry than afraid; she couldn't understand the benefit of hurting a child to get to a government and Bucky could only tell her that that's what Stark had said, too. Neither of them would have slept easily that night even without Stevie being colicky. 

The official conscription notice came the first week of January and, after an evening where they quietly mourned in the privacy and shelter of their own home, they went through the motions of publicly expressing shock and anger and outrage. Bucky's parents took it hardest -- that picture of him from '43 might rest in an album in Bucky's home, but it had been seared into their memories first -- but it hit everyone. His sister Helen wrote angry letters to congressmen and the Department of Defense and even the White House, to which Bucky could only point out that Truman was three weeks away from not caring and Eisenhower wasn't exactly going to be sympathetic to someone not wanting to put on a uniform. His bosses, as they had with everyone else who'd gotten draft notices, assured him that there'd be a place for him once he got back. 

By the time Eisenhower was taking his oath in DC, Bucky had already re-sworn his own to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic, and had been issued the uniform of a staff sergeant. It was a promotion over the rank he'd been retired at, but it had been deemed practical by both the Army and SHIELD. "It's a rank that has a relative independence to it," Stark had explained. "High enough to have serious responsibility, not high enough to be an NCOIC of anything important, and possibly the mastermind behind some headquarters company and nobody wants to mess with those. In the 'do nothing to attract blame' culture of the armed forces, it's better than a mythical cloak of invisibility. Nobody will question your movements." 

The home front did not go as smoothly. Molly, after her initial brave front, started to waver a little as his departure date loomed and he tried to do his best there, both by being present and involved when he was home and reassuring her that this was just a few months away, not necessarily the start of a long goodbye. But they both knew that this really was exactly that. The kids took it differently; Matty didn't really understand beyond "Daddy's going away for a little while," but Judy was old enough to have friends whose fathers had been drafted and had been gone for as long as she'd known them and at least one had died in Korea. She'd clung to him like glue and cried herself to sleep for a week, sure that once her father left it would be for good, and it wasn't until Molly gave her a calendar with his first weekend home circled in blue and showed her how they'd count down the days that she calmed down even a little. 

"You'd best make that date," Molly warned him later that night. 

"I'll go AWOL if I have to," he'd promised. 

Retraining in Georgia was both very much and nothing alike what he'd gone through the first time. The point wasn't to break them and reshape them into something useful, but instead to chisel away what civilian life had layered atop the useful soldier who'd once been. So while the abuse was less, it was better focused when it did come. Being told that your failure here would get someone killed down range was a far more cutting blow to someone who _had_ been in the field and had seen men die because of someone's mistakes. 

He was the oldest of his group by at least five years; the baby was Stevenson, who'd made corporal in '49 before his enlistment had been up. Three were draftees, but the others were guys who'd re-enlisted either for the regular paycheck or to escape whatever mess they'd made of their civilian life and were deemed sharp enough to not have to go through Basic all over again. He stuck to the story of being drafted by Howard Stark, which mostly provoked awe and jealousy, but a few of the guys understood how undesirable it really was. 

He might've been the oldest, but it was obvious by the end of the first day that he was the best. It scared him a little to see how little effort it took to keep up, to meet the requirements, to be _adequate_ when he still had the memories of how hard he'd had to work and how much he'd had to give before to get the same results. What he'd done at Lehigh had been without any context, without any competition, and even after Wendell had explained to him how above-average the results were, that was nothing to being able to keep up with Stevenson, a decade younger, the first day and pass easily him by the end of the first week. He was getting fitter faster than anyone else, faster than could be explained by his concocted story of having trained at the Police Academy grounds with his brother once he'd gotten his draft notice. 

(The only preparation he'd done with Charlie was to pull him aside at a family dinner one Sunday and ask him to keep a professional eye on Molly and the kids, explaining that being drafted to work for Howard Stark might draw the wrong kind of attention and, besides, everyone in the neighborhood would know that, in his absence, the man of the house was still getting potty trained. Charlie swore to him that he'd talk to someone at the 108th to keep an eye out.)

Ten days in, they told him to pack up because he was shipping out to Fort Jackson to join another training platoon, one that had gone through the PT-heavy portion of the program already and was focusing on refreshing leadership and soldiering skills. He was unsurprised to see Peggy Carter, wearing a uniform with a major's rank, waiting when he showed up to meet the plane. 

"We can't bring you home," she explained after she'd dragged him off to a different part of the airfield. "The Army won't play along if we do; allegedly there are skills you'll need that only they can re-instill." 

He couldn't help but smile at the sarcasm that dripped off of her words. He didn't do more because his mouth was full. She'd brought him a real pastrami sandwich from New York, which had markedly improved his mood. He'd eaten like a pig at a trough during training, everyone did because they were working so hard, but along with the shocking improvement in his physical abilities had come a faster metabolism and he now burned through what he ate that much quicker as well. Also, it was pastrami on rye with real mustard, which was not something the Army provided because it hadn't been offered by the lowest bidder. It was his first meal that tasted like anything since he'd left Molly's table. 

"The group you'll be joining at Fort Jackson will be done in two weeks-plus, so you'll still be back a month earlier than planned," she went on, not expecting him to reply. "The cadre has been told that you were injured in a previous cycle and have been rehabilitating, which will explain your arrival, although only partially your prowess. I am frankly unsure what advice to offer you there. We pulled you out of here before someone got too suspicious, but, to be blunt, you are what you were created to be and there will very possibly be a point at which it is impossible to hide that." 

He'd been too stunned by his own body over the last week to react to what she'd said any more strongly than to wipe his mouth free of mustard so he could smirk. He'd wondered a thousand times what Zola would think -- what Wendell or Wakefield or any of the others at Lehigh would think -- if they'd seen him now. At least Zola was dead; the others, he was sure, would be reading about it soon, if they weren't already. He didn't know if he'd have to see them once he moved up to Lehigh, but hoped he didn't.

"If you can delay that impossible point until you're up at Lehigh, all the better," Peggy said, taking a sip from the straw of her drink, leaving lipstick stains behind. "But on the off chance that the Army really does have something to teach you, if there's anything that you feel will make you better able to handle what comes next, then that should be your priority. We'll put out any fires that start as a result. We may be putting on a panto, but that doesn't mean you can't get something from it, too." 

The platoon he joined at Fort Jackson was fundamentally similar to the one he'd left behind in Georgia, just different in the particulars. Nobody gave him much mind after the first long run, when he proved that he wasn't going to bring group punishment down upon them for lagging behind. Overall, he didn't have to try as hard not to be exceptional; there was PT twice a day, but most of what they were doing was strategic and tactical work, re-learning how to be an NCO instead of just figuring out how to be a soldier. The only time he really cut loose was during a night exercise, when nobody could see him. It felt exhilarating to race through the trees and over the open ground at speeds he knew nobody could match; his night vision had been good before his capture and it was better now and he just _ran_ , unbothered by the ruck on his back and unworried by the uneven ground ill-lit by the night sky. He knew this wasn't natural, wasn't normal, was everything he'd hidden and wasn't anything he'd wanted and had instead been the source of most of his nightmares over the past nine-plus years and the reason he'd been ripped from his family and his life. But for a few hours, he'd let all of that go and and just _was_. He'd thought of Judy, running pell-mell down the block with all the energy of youth. He'd thought of Steve, who must have marveled at the first time he'd run like the wind instead of having it knocked out of him. For just a little bit, in the dark, where nobody including himself could see it, he'd let himself be a marvel, too, instead of whatever the hell he'd be when the sun rose. 

And then he'd taken a nap against a tree because nobody in the cadre would believe that he'd completed his objective in so little time. 

The Army made a tiny show of re-confirming his rank before letting him go to his next assignment. All but a few of the guys in the platoon were going into the ranks, some directly to Korea, even. He had orders for Fort Dix, a non-existent unit that housed all sorts of men whose actual jobs were different from what the Army thought they were. When he got there, he went through an hour of bureaucratic box-checking before someone from SHIELD showed up to take him to Lehigh. He hated being so close to home and yet so far away; he'd written Molly to tell her about the change in location and revised schedule, but he'd kept it out of his letters to Judy because he didn't know for certain when they'd be letting him go home and he couldn't give her an earlier date and then miss it. 

Lehigh had once been an Army base and so the barracks were Army barracks, one long room with a dozen bunk beds lined up on either side of the center aisle. But Bucky was surprised to find himself assigned to a single room in a separate building that housed the training cadre. He was free to get up at 0430 along with the cadets, he was told, but his training was going to be specialized and they'd figured he'd done enough of the unit bonding business down with the Army. 

"You're going to be a lone wolf," Agent Hastings told him with a shrug. "This is practice for that, too."

He'd had enough of pre-dawn formations down south, so he didn't run with the cadets at 0500, but he did run every morning at the more civilized hour of 0800 and he did so with a monitor holding a stopwatch. And, after the first day, an audience that included faces he remembered from the labs, including Wendell's. The running was organized, not like the circus stunts he'd done for the crowd the first time he'd been to Lehigh, but instead to best improve his stamina and speed through a combination of sprints and long distances and using the hilly terrain at the northern end of the camp. It was the same with weight training and then again with swimming, programs that had been designed with his body in mind -- including snack breaks -- and tweaked once everyone realized that nobody really knew what they thought they did. The tests he'd done last year had been baselines since rendered obsolete, the same way the tests he'd done in '44 had been meaningless last year. But that was where the similarities ended. This time, instead of being treated like a really interesting lab specimen, he was treated like an elite athlete. Which sometimes veered into 'prize cow' territory, but mostly it was people talking to him like a person and asking him questions where the answers were taken seriously instead of just reading things off of charts. Which in turn sometimes meant some very strange conversations -- he would have been happy to never have to discuss his bowel movements so frequently ever again -- but it also kept them from repeating any of the incidents that had made his first trips to Lehigh so horrible. 

But the PT portion of his day, involved as it was, turned out to be only a small part. Most of his time was spent learning how to be a spy alongside the cadets. How to follow someone without being spotted, how to tell you were being followed and how to lose them, how to use a dead drop and how to make a live pass, how to do remote surveillance and how to sit through a stakeout, and most of all how to get useful information out of your activities. It was hard to take seriously the first day, too much like the hardboiled detective stories that were always lying around the train crew break room at Penn Station. But by the end of the first week, he'd shifted his mindset enough to see it all as just an extension of what he'd been doing at Fort Jackson. And here, at least, he didn't have to hide his light under a bushel; if he had to quickly climb a high fence to either follow a person or lose a shadow, he could. But most of what he needed, honestly, didn't come from his body, it came from his head. His observational skills, his patience to sit through a surveillance shift, these weren't anything he'd gotten from an injection; they'd come from working on the railroad. 

On Friday afternoon, after the last class let out and he'd done his afternoon PT, they told him he was at liberty until 0800 Monday and if he hurried, he could catch the next bus that took SHIELD personnel straight up to Manhattan. He hurried, choosing to shower instead of taking the time to call home -- his room had its own phone, but it ran through a switchboard and the operator would be busy this time of day. He wore his Army uniform, as befitted a soldier going home on a weekend pass, but it didn't really hit him until he was walking down Eighth to Penn Station from the Port Authority Bus Terminal that he really was a soldier again. He hadn't been back among civilians -- real civilians, not the pretend ones at Lehigh -- for more than a month and it was more jarring than he'd thought it would be because, in his mind, he had still considered himself one of them. But he wasn't. He almost stopped walking and turned back north to go up to Times Square to catch the 7 train instead of going to Penn, where he'd possibly run into people he knew and was suddenly unsure he was prepared to see. But the train was so much faster than the subway and he needed desperately to be _home_ , where he could take off his uniform and be Bucky Barnes, husband and father, and not the prize thoroughbred SHIELD was training or the NCO the Army thought it had just gotten back. Where he could be Steve Rogers's friend and not the man being taught to hunt him down. 

At Penn, he looked at the departure board to see when the next train was and then found a car he knew nobody would come through to collect tickets before he debarked. Fifteen minutes later, he was walking down his block and had to keep himself from running when he saw the lights in the living room were on. He had his keys, but he rang the doorbell anyway, feeling tears well up when he heard Judy arguing with Matty about who got to open the door. (It was an academic argument because neither of them were tall enough to reach the deadbolt.) Molly made a choked-off noise when she saw him; she'd known that he was up in Jersey, he'd spoken to her almost every night, but he hadn't known if they'd give him a pass this weekend. The kids went a little nuts, Judy breaking into tears and then Matty watching her curiously before starting to sob in sympathy. Only Molly knew that he'd maybe joined them a little, but that was okay. 

He was hungry, especially coming in to a house that smelled of roast chicken, but the kids had already eaten and so he played in the living room with them until it was time for bed (a little late, but not too late because he would be there in the morning). He got to see Stevie when he put Matty into his new bed; Stevie had gotten too big for the cradle and had needed the crib. He'd missed this, just in the time he'd been gone -- Dottie's husband Joe had brought the bed in and set it up -- and he hated it, but he couldn't dwell on it. Certainly not after Stevie woke up bawling because his siblings were making so much noise right next to him. He built the pillow fortress Matty needed so that he wouldn't roll out of the bed, picked up Stevie, and then went into Judy's room to read her a story (and yes, Stevie had to hear it, too, or else nobody was going to hear anything over him crying). It was chaotic, nothing like the bustle of the barracks at Fort Jackson and the complete opposite of the silent, sterile life of his room at Lehigh, and he loved it.

When he came back downstairs, Molly was warming dinner for them. "You should call your parents," she told him, batting his hand away from where he was picking at the chicken carcass. "Let them know you're home."

"Tomorrow?" He'd survived the drama with the kids, barely; he wasn't sure he was up for a repeat performance with his folks. 

"Tonight," Molly insisted. "They won't ask to see you before Sunday, but they're worried about you."

He didn't bother pointing out that there was no inherent danger in refresher training; that wasn't why they were worried.

Thankfully, his father picked up when he called and they kept the conversation brief and low-key, although he could hear the emotion in his father's voice. He assured them that he was fine, tired, extremely hungry, and would still be at least two of the three when he showed up with his family for Sunday supper.

Dinner was interrupted twice by one of the kids sneaking out of bed to see him, but eventually they went to sleep for real and he could talk to Molly. Who seemed to be managing well enough in his absence, which he didn't mistake for being okay. His family was looking out for her, so were her friends in the neighborhood and the folks at church who did that sort of thing for the parish, but the true burden of knowing what he was doing and why, that was hers to carry alone. He did his best to keep her from worrying about him before she actually had to, picking out the lighthearted episodes from what he'd done and how different Lehigh was this time around. He complained about the awfulness of Army food and that SHIELD food wasn't any better because it was the same company with the contract, but that everyone at Lehigh thought it was far superior. He was eating all the time anyway now, he admitted, because SHIELD knew what the Army didn't and didn't want him dropping any more weight.

"You always did eat a lot," she told him with a wry smile. "If I'd had to go back and be a detective and figure out one thing about you that wasn't like everyone else, it would be how there could be so many cracker and peanut crumbs in your coat pockets and still such an appetite at dinner. And here I'd thought you just loved my cooking..."

Her reaction was less bemused later on, when she saw him in his skivvies; her gasp was more out of surprise than delight.

"I didn't lose that much," he protested as she crossed the room with concern on her face. He'd lost ten pounds while with the Army, most of it at the beginning in Georgia, but had put two back on just in the first week at Lehigh once they'd put him on the "Captain America diet." (Which included far too much beef liver for his own taste; Steve had probably been in heaven.) He hadn't been fat to begin with, though, and he'd been issued smaller-waisted pants when he'd reported to Fort Jackson. But even so, he hadn't thought the physical changes had been so severe; Molly clearly thought otherwise.

"It's different," she said as she touched his chest lightly, like she wasn't sure what she'd find.

"Well, that's damning by faint praise," he replied sourly. "Should I put my undershirt back on?"

Molly looked up at him and frowned. "It's very becoming," she assured, not sounding the least bit impressed. "You could be a movie star on the cover of _Screen Actor_. But you look like a soldier now and I don't think I was prepared for that."

He pulled her into a hug. "I don't think I was prepared for that, either," he admitted.

The weekend was too short. Saturday he took care of some of the things Molly hadn't wanted to ask her brothers-in-law to do, with two comets trailing after him 'helping' and mostly getting underfoot. Sunday was church (yes, he had to go) and then down to his parents and it was a long day of being welcomed home and concern being expressed and as happy as he was to see his family, at least, it was draining. His mother commented on his weight loss the minute he walked in the door, followed by almost everyone else, but he could at least eat enough to assure them that it was a result of exercise and not anything else. (His niece Carol asked him if he had a tapeworm, which led to a discussion of what, exactly, they were teaching third graders at St. Anne's.) Monday morning, he was up well before dawn to be at Penn to catch the 5:25 train to Hackettstown.

The second and third weeks at Lehigh were refinements of the first one -- better-directed PT, a new diet plan that had him regaining another couple of pounds without any more broiled liver, more tradecraft practice with the cadets -- but also added new activities. He started Russian lessons and a history of the Cold War with the cadets, bringing workbooks and flashcards back to his room in the evenings so he could pick up the Cyrillic alphabet and learn which Directorate did what for the MGB and what was going to happen in Moscow now after Stalin had died. Learning Russian was hard for more than just the new alphabet. He joined the cadets in the mess hall some evenings and they quizzed each other and made up nonsensical sentences in bad accents. The cadets were kids, far younger than the SHIELD agents he'd encountered so far, and they sometimes made him feel very old, but it was nice to have people to talk with, even if he couldn't talk about much of why he was there. There were a couple of women among them; he was surprised that there were any, honestly. Peggy had always struck him as an exception that proved the rule. Only one of them put the moves on him and the rest seemed more relieved that he didn't try to put any on them. The guys were all draft age and most of them felt the need to explain to him why they weren't in uniform; he didn't really care, but he didn't judge, either, and that was good enough.

He also started shooting for Stark, who had been serious about the work. He was given three rifles very similar to the one he'd seen at Stark's mansion, but with different tweaks to make them better suited to sharpshooting. There were entire flats of ammo and a trio of bound notebooks with carbon paper so that he could document the experience in duplicate. One of the rifles he immediately sent back; the trigger pull had a hitch to it that made the barrel jump. The other two (Sid and Imogene) were keepers, though, and he dutifully recorded his shooting scores and impressions. His shoulder got sore from the recoil of the stock, but the good kind of sore (at least on days when he didn't have to lift weights) and his accuracy improved with so much practice. He started moving the targets further and further back and asked for a tarp so he could shoot prone; the day he got it, it started snowing, wet snow that formed puddles instead of piles, and he ended up cocooning himself in the tarp and ignoring the drip of cold water against the back of his neck. He rolled the rifles in dirt and talcum powder, left them in the deep freezer overnight, even dropped them in a pickle barrel for a few hours, and then took them to the range. Shooting became the highlight of his work day, nobody nearby and he could judge his own performance and that performance was unaffected by anything that had been done to him or anything they would ask him to do. Sharpshooting in the war had been lonely and crushing work, firing bullets that were not addressed "to whom it may concern" but instead were personally dedicated; he'd watched his targets move and breathe and sometimes look nothing like an enemy and he'd held their lives on the scale balanced by the weight of his trigger pull. Firing at paper targets, at tin cans and glass bottles, at dummies wearing fatigues was nothing like it, no matter how similar the motion. He turned in the carbon copies of his reports daily and didn't know how often they were sent up to New York or whether Stark read them when they got there, but two days after he reported that Imogene's telescopic sight had fogged up in the cold and wet, there was a box containing a new one. 

The next weekend home was less of an event. He called his parents, but didn't have to visit; the furthest he traveled was over to Queens Boulevard so he could take Judy and two of her friends to see the new Disney movie, _Peter Pan_. Each weekend home grew more comfortable and less like an event; it wasn't anything like when he'd been actually living at home, but he felt less like a guest. The kids went to their friends' and cousins' birthday parties as scheduled, Molly had lists of things she wanted him to do, and if there were plans that weren't made or places not gone to because he only had two days at home, well, so be it. This was still better than being halfway down the coast or across the world and he knew better than to complain. 

One Monday morning, the cadets were nowhere to be found and his Russian lesson turned into an all-day one-on-one tutorial. Nobody seemed to know where they were, which was bullshit. It wasn't until Tuesday that he found out: they were learning how to be prisoners and survive interrogation and captivity.

"Nobody felt that was a skill set that you needed refreshed," Hastings, the guy more or less in charge of his schedule, said when Bucky finally brought it up.

Instead, his masters decided it was time for a different kind of hell: they introduced him to the work of The American. _Steve_. 

The files were horrible, the photographs full of violence for spectacle's sake, the savagery so over the top as to be hard to take as fact and not movie fiction. That Steve had done this, with his bare hands, was incomprehensible. That anyone could have done this, even, but _Steve_...

Steve had been capable of it, absolutely. But that wasn't enough to actually go through with doing it; that was the Soviets' doing. The war had changed Steve, as it changed everyone. It had taken too much of his light, stripped him not of the things that had made him a good person, but instead of the things that had allowed that goodness to shine. It had made him a man comfortable with killing, if not exactly eager to do it. And that had scared him. That night after Stark's party in '45, after they'd gone out for sandwiches and then escorted Molly home, they'd ended up walking and talking. And Steve had asked him if this was normal, to not flinch at taking another man's life, or if he'd lost whatever it was that had made Erskine choose him in the first place. "Am I still a good man? Or am I a perfect soldier?" Bucky had assured him that if he had to ask, then the answer was still yes, he was a good man. And Steve had accepted that answer, had been grateful, even, not just because Bucky'd been the one giving it and he'd known Steve forever, but also because Steve knew he understood from war.

But now, years later, the question had to be asked again and Bucky couldn't give an answer, certainly not the same answer. The American was a perfect soldier; whether he was a good man depended on how much of Steve was left inside of him.

That afternoon, he went out to shoot despite the poor light and the cold, wanting to clear his head of what he'd seen and what he was realizing he'd have to keep seeing, to face in the flesh, if he wanted to bring Steve home. Of course, that's when Sid-the-rifle exploded in his face after a hangfire. Once he'd made sure he was still intact -- startled, a little burned and cut on his face and hands, but otherwise okay -- he took what was left of the piece apart and put it in a box and told Ordnance to send it up to Stark. He went running instead, which might have been as much of a metaphor as the hangfire.

First thing the next day, he was promised a new rifle still warm from the mold, but of more newsworthiness, he had Peggy Carter waiting for him in the out-of-the-way building that housed Project Revanche, which was the operation to get Steve home. The building had two above-ground levels and a basement, so far staffed with analysts and a couple of secretaries; Peggy had taken an office on the first floor. 

"The good news is that we've figured out where The American is being sent," she said when he arrived. She looked exhausted, the kind of tired that not even expensive cosmetics perfectly applied could cover. He hadn't seen her since that day at the airfield at Benning, when he'd been in transit to Fort Jackson, but apparently she'd been busy. "The bad news is that we don't know who his target is."

He looked at the maps on the wall. "Korea," he said, unsurprised. Of course. Of course this funhouse mirror version of Steve would plunge them both back into the fighting when the real one had spent so much capital getting Bucky out of it. Of course he'd force Peggy to completely walk back her promise -- to leave Bucky alone, to not force him to relive his worst experiences, to keep him away from war. "Of course."

From the look on Peggy's face, she was thinking the same thing.

"If it could have been anywhere else," she sighed in resignation. "The chatter we've overheard and what has been confirmed by sources in Moscow says that he's being sent to help the Chinese help the North Koreans, either for the mutual benefit of the advancement of communism, or to show the Chinese that it's business as usual even without Stalin, or simply to make the Americans more eager to agree to unfavorable armistice conditions. I've yet to be convinced the reason matters. We don't know if he's got a specific target that he'll eliminate and then leave or if he's there to become a general disruptive force. We don't know anything, really, except that he's going to be there."

Bucky crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the cabinet he was standing next to. "So you're just going to toss me into the fighting and hope I find him before he finds his target?"

Once upon a time, as recently as Christmas, this would have come out bitter and angry and suspicious. He still was bitter and angry and suspicious, but he'd also been around these people for long enough that they'd earned a little bit of credit. They might very well toss him into the middle of a war -- he suspected they would -- but it would not be because they had no better ideas and weren't too worried about what happened to him. Exposure worked both ways and these people had been around him, too, and they wouldn't dare be as thoughtless or reckless or inconsiderate as they had been before they'd had to accept that he was a person and not a set of numbers on a lab result.

"We're hoping to do a little better than that," Peggy replied, then frowned. "But I'm afraid you might not appreciate the difference."

He might, but he didn't think Molly would.

Peggy told him that Project Revanche, after mostly simmering while waiting for actionable intelligence, would be fully on the boil starting tomorrow; people were still flying in and preparing briefing materials. "Hopefully, we'll sound like we know what we're doing."

Bucky nodded. It didn't sound like he'd be excluded from any of the meetings or discussions; Peggy intended to treat him the way she'd once treated Steve -- professionally, at least -- and he was grateful for it. He might not have a vote in the decisions, but he could at least see how they'd been reached. Ugly orders -- and there was none uglier than being sent out to hunt down your best friend -- could be made that much less difficult to follow if you understood how very much worse every other option was.

The following morning, after PT and breakfast, he found a seat in the briefing room, which looked like a classroom with desks attached to the chairs that all faced a series of blackboards. Some of the analysts he recognized by face, although he'd only spoken to one of them, Kasden, who'd asked him for descriptions of Steve's habits and favorite things -- foods, colors, books, actors, music -- to see if anything had been transferred over to the personality of The American the way his doodling had. (Kasden thought the picture that had ended up identifying Steve had likely been a coincidence, something he'd done for his cover and not a habit; the Soviets presumably knew Steve had drawn and would have discouraged the activity had his handlers been witness to it.) Stark was there, sitting next to Peggy, and he waved Bucky over when he saw him, gesturing for Bucky to take the seat at his open side. 

"I left your new test rifles at Ordnance Supply," Stark said. "But I'd like you to give me your preferences so I can get on yours, let you have some time with it before you decide to take it with you to Korea or not."

He nodded, unprepared to give more of an answer. It wasn't as if he had forgotten that he was going to be sent to the middle of the war, but he'd put it aside in favor of exploring all of the different horrors of having to hunt down his best friend like a deer in season. Which was what had kept him up for half the night, the half that wasn't a nightmare of Zola's lab, of Steve finding him but, instead of freeing him from the restraints, Steve had torn open his rib cage with his bare hands and ripped out his heart. He'd woken up screaming, grateful only for the first second that he was alone, then desperately missing Molly with a pain that outdid the phantom ache of his not-really-torn-apart chest. 

The briefing, given by an analyst named Devere, began with an overview. This was what The American had done, this is why Steve Rogers was likely The American, here are some theories for how he survived the plane crash, and this is how it was possible for the Soviets to retain control over what should have been a very unwilling subject. Devere gave very dumbed-down explanations for the scientific business, basically saying that Steve -- "and Sergeant Barnes, for that matter" -- would have been able to survive an injury to brain or body that would have killed a normal man. The mind control might have several explanations, including drugs, torture, or both in combination with trauma-induced amnesia -- Steve had woken up, hadn't known where or who he was, and the Soviets had never let him remember. 

But one possibility that could not be discounted was that Steve was, essentially, truly dead. "That he could survive a traumatic brain injury that would have killed anyone else does not mean that he can recover from one intact. Everything in his brain that made him Steve Rogers could be gone for good even if everything else works fine. Whether it happened in the crash or the fall or whether the Soviets helped it out with a lobotomy, there is a chance that there are no memories to recover and there is no personality to re-emerge. This is, I am told, not the likeliest possibility, but it has to be on the table: Steve Rogers, as a man, may in fact have died in 1945."

Bucky could feel eyes on him, although not as many as were on Peggy, he'd guess. This was what he was going to have to figure out, if he ever saw Steve face-to-face again, whether Steve just needed to be 'deprogrammed' or whether Steve was, in fact, gone for good. This was the burden Peggy and Stark and the others were putting on him, especially if he had to do this assessment through the telescopic sights of one of Stark's fancy rifles. The plan was for that never to be the situation, but, like the plan to never send him to Korea, it was really more of a hope. The hope was that they could find Steve and that he could either break the Soviets' control enough that he'd be able to bring Steve in quietly or that he'd be able to survive a physical encounter and bring Steve in by force. But the plan might end up being far different and all he could do was pray that they both lived through it. 

"But that's a bridge we'll cross when we get to it," Devere went on a little too loudly as the murmuring built up. "Right now, we have our work cut out for us trying to figure out why he's in Korea and what he might be doing there."

The analysts' favorite choice right now was that The American -- and that's what they called him -- was going to try to assassinate General Clark. Bucky accepted the logic of it, why not go for the top man in-country if you were sending your most theatrical assassin, but didn't share the analysts' belief in how an army -- or a war -- was run and that made him doubt their certitude. He'd spent the last month learning how to be a spy, which did not mean that he actually knew how to be one. But there had been many warnings during the lectures on surveillance and data analysis about how easy it was to make the facts fit what you wanted to believe, how a wild guess got turned into an operating principle without any supporting evidence, and how the unwillingness to say "I don't know" just to cover your ass had lost lives and battles. He wished he knew how much of those lectures the analysts still remembered. 

"A war's like a mass," he said to Stark during a break. He'd followed him and Peggy outside, none of them bothering with coats, and accepted a cigarette when offered. "You don't need a pope, just a priest. You kill the CO, there's the XO who knows more about what's going on than the first guy. You kill the lieutenant, his platoon sergeant'll handle things just fine. If I wanted to mess things up in Korea, I'd take out the ops-and-plans people, not the guys in the news."

Next to Stark, Peggy smiled around her cigarette. "We chose our analysis unit for this project by other factors than their war experiences. I don't think they appreciate the many ways an army is different from a monarchy. I've already emphasized that I don't want them focusing on a target just because it's tidy, but a few more reminders won't hurt. In the meanwhile, I'm glad you're thinking outside the lines. Don't be afraid to speak up in session. It does them good to be challenged, especially by someone who has seen the world."

Bucky coughed and flicked ash. "The world I've seen is just what's outside train windows." 

He'd been glad to be invited to the planning and prep, but he hadn't confused that with anyone wanting his input on anything. He was the muscle on this operation, aimed where told, and he didn't especially want to put himself in a position for them to remind him of it. He'd been a soldier long enough to know that the NCOs were supposed to be present but not speak unless spoken to in a group setting. 

Peggy took a long drag off her cigarette, blowing smoke off to the side before she replied. "You're very wrong, Sergeant Barnes. You have seen plenty in this world that nobody else in that room has and most never will. You have seen war and death and evil far too intimately. You have seen grief and you have seen salvation and you have seen _life_ , you have helped create it and held it in your arms and protected it. That is its own wisdom and should not be dismissed." 

She raised her eyebrows as if to challenge his denial, then gave them both a quick smile and walked off, calling to one of the analysts not Devere. 

"She's feeling poetical today," Stark said as they watched her go, then pulled a small notebook out of his jacket's inner pocket. "So about your rifle: let's start with barrel length..."

There were meetings for the rest of the day and then two days later, in between which Bucky trained, tested out the new rifles, and successfully argued against being sent out to Camp Carson for a short course of winter training; he'd been soldiering and then training in the cold and snow for months already and he'd gone through it once before in '42 and the curriculum probably hadn't changed too much.

Meanwhile, Peggy and the others were working on how to plausibly get him to Korea without drawing attention or suspicion. If they'd had a target, they could have been more careful with their options, but as it was, they just wanted to get him in country and then move him closer to the target once they figured it out. It was logical, especially because Korea was so far away, but it also meant that he was likely going to be kicking around in a war zone for a while and there was no way to just be okay with that. 

The meetings were more of the same conversations, discussions about targets and likely angles of approach and, especially, the problem of finding The American in a country with hundreds of thousands of Americans (and Canadians and other nationalities Steve might be able to pass as if he still had his languages), all of them lawfully carrying firearms. The simple fact of it was that while almost everyone in a US uniform would know that Steve Rogers had been Captain America, almost none of them knew what Steve Rogers looked like. Steve had had his cowl on for every publicity shot, every poster, every movie clip, every handshaking and baby-kissing appearance; he'd been the most popular man in the world in 1945 and still been able to walk around New York City unrecognized. A couple of newspapers had printed photos of his face after the plane had gone down and then when he'd been declared dead, but that had been it and that was years ago now. Even if the Soviets hadn't changed his appearance, even if he hadn't been scarred or marred by the crash, Steve's presence would go unnoticed until it was too late because it wouldn't be remarkable in the slightest.

On Friday afternoon, Bucky accepted Stark's offer of a ride back into Manhattan. During the trip they mostly talked about the rifles, both the testers and the one Stark was building for him. But they also talked about Steve, not as The American, but as _Steve_. Stark asked him about the Steve from before Rebirth, the art student and soda jerk, and he ended up telling a story from when they were kids and Steve convinced him to go to the Bronx Zoo -- without parental supervision or approval. They had probably been nine and ten, maybe, and Steve had really wanted to see an elephant _right now_ so he could draw them better. So they'd snuck onto the subway, gone up to the Bronx, and gotten in by simply paying for tickets. They saw Steve's elephant, plus lions and monkeys and whatever else, shared a bag of peanuts, and gone home at the end of the day to find the cops canvassing the neighborhood for two missing boys. "I might still have the strap marks on my ass from that whupping," he concluded. "And Steve had to wash the floors in his place every day for a month because his ma didn't like to hit him, although she came close to letting my pop do it for her. And we both had to write apologies to the policemen, Father Lannan for organizing the search parties, and to both of our parents. But Steve drew elephants on every single one of his. My ma still has the one he wrote her."

When he got back to Woodside, the house was in a mild ruckus because Matty had swallowed a marble. The doctor had told Molly that she was just going to have to wait for it to pass, but in the meanwhile, Judy 'needed' that particular marble and wasn't being pacified by the promise of a replacement. 

"I'm tempted to tell her that she can go fishing for it in the toilet bowl when it appears," Molly admitted, "but she just might." 

He didn't tell Molly about the imminent orders to Korea until after the kids were asleep. She took it about as well as he could have hoped, which was more resignation than anger, although definitely both. She cried, though, and he could comfort her while she did, but he couldn't tell her not to be afraid for him because he was afraid for himself.

The best-case scenario was that he found The American, who took one look at him and turned back into _Steve_ , but that was really magical, wishful thinking that wasn't impossible but was hardly likely. The American had been on his own for hours that day in Brussels; he hadn't even had an MGB watcher with him. It meant that the Soviets weren't worried about giving him a long leash, which also meant that they were pretty damned sure that seeing anything familiar wouldn't register. And that, in turn, meant that Bucky had no advantage for having known Steve for almost thirty years. Which left him with no advantage whatsoever.

Steve as Captain America had been stronger than he was now and quicker; the docs at Lehigh had the files to prove it. His own improvement since the testing days had been remarkable (to the doctors, it had been more disturbing to himself), but he was still not Steve as he had been. God only knew what Steve was like now, what the Soviets could have done to him, because nobody at Lehigh did.

Nobody knew much of anything at Lehigh these days and, now that it was going to be his ass on the line, that wasn't a comforting feeling. 

The analysts had come up with a whole host of scenarios for finding The American and what could happen after, ranging from the fantastic to the fatalistic, and the fact was that almost all of them involved him in direct conflict with Steve, either face-to-face or from a distance through a rifle sight. He knew that they'd figured he'd die in some of these scenarios, especially the ones where it was just the two of them without the SHIELD backup team that was supposed to be there. He didn't know what percentage it was, though, and didn't want to. Peggy and the others kept telling him not to worry too much, that the SHIELD team was supposed to be there, but the first casualty of war was the plan and he would consider their timely presence a gift and not a given.

He wasn't the only one to be less than perkily optimistic. Stark had quietly told him during the drive back to New York that should the worst happen, he'd see to Molly and the kids personally, that they'd want for nothing and that the kids would be protected from the greedy scientists in the basement at Lehigh as well as any possible Soviet reprisals. It was a small comfort, but not one he'd wanted to dwell on beyond saying thanks. 

Here and now, though, he was still alive, still in Queens - at least for the weekend -- and they decided not to tell anyone about Korea until he got a departure date. Molly was considering asking her mother to come stay; her family were fishermen on the County Sligo coastline and none of them had been to America since the wedding. His family would help, as they had been, but they all had their own families to look after, too, and three kids was a lot with no relief. And Molly should have whatever comfort her own family could offer her. 

Judy did not get her marble back; Bucky took her and Matty to the corner store for a new one (that turned out to be two) and a toy car for Matty that he was made to promise would not go in his mouth for any reason. 

Monday morning, Stark handed him a box that turned out to contain six clips for the rifle Stark had built for him. "They're dummy rounds," Stark explained. "The real ones will be full of sedative hopefully strong enough to knock down a super-soldier, but we can see how these'll fly. And, more importantly, how they'll land."

Coming up with non-lethal options for dealing with The American in the likely event that he did not accept that he'd ever been anything but a Soviet assassin had been on the to-do list since Revanche had started. Coming up with ideas that were at all practical or that SHIELD had the capacity to put into practice, that was harder. Bucky's own hellish experiences with anesthesia had proven that they couldn't take it on faith that what would have brought Steve down in '45 would have an identical effect in '53. The problem with overdosing was that it could kill Steve, the problem with underdosing was that it could kill _him_ if it just pissed off The American more.

After the morning sessions, Stark suggested they go shoot. On the ride over to the long-distance range, he and Stark talked about muzzle speed and air resistance and finding a caliber of bullet that wouldn't go right through but also wouldn't do too much damage while inside. It was, like everything else, a balancing act between the negative consequences of every possible action. Stark had absolute faith that Bucky could hit what he aimed at, which was flattering, but the problem was that high-velocity rounds could only be fired into so many points on a human body without causing either fatal or permanent damage -- or not enough damage to matter. Given the givens, Bucky would rather aim at a butt or a thigh, reasonably-sized, meaty targets with enough muscle to slow down a round and a bone thick enough not to shatter into dust if it got hit. Steve wouldn't mind being on the gimp if he got to hobble around as himself. The dummies today at Lehigh were just torsos, though, so he'd have to shoot center mass here. 

Armed with radios, Bucky went to his preferred spot and Stark stood near the dummy targets with a couple of cadet agents ready to do legwork. The magazines in the box were all distinctly labeled and a check of each showed different bullet types, although they all seemed to have the same casing. (He trusted Stark to make bullets that weren't going to blow up on him, but he ejected them all and gave them a once-over before reloading because he always loaded his own clips.) He inserted each clip as Stark called for them, letting the cadets move the targets in or out between rounds according to Stark's instructions. He could see the damage on each dummy after each shot through the scope, but Stark's commentary was a more reliable, if also more colorful, indicator. There were slight variations in how each style shot, but Stark seemed to have a favorite by the end and congratulated Bucky on his fine shooting and for not hitting any of the cadets.

By Friday, he had an unofficial departure date: April 18th. It was the week after Easter, at least, but was still only a couple of weeks away and left him with very little time to prepare himself or his family. He asked to start living at home and commuting to Lehigh each day, just to get some time with them and was initially told no, but a short and ugly argument with Peggy got the decision overturned. The final arrangement had him commuting with Stark, which meant he had to be at Stark's place by 0630 each day, which was fine. He'd probably have to spend his last few nights stateside at Lehigh, but that would have happened regardless. 

His cover for going to Korea was hardly a cover because it was true: SHIELD was going to stop fighting off the Army when it came to putting SSG Barnes on the front lines where he belonged. The Army had retrained him with the expectation that they were going to get to use him; SHIELD had never intended for that to happen, but had known better than to tell the Department of the Army that. Now, however, it would be useful for getting him to Korea. "If I don't get killed by the Chinese before you find where Steve is going to be," Bucky pointed out with some asperity. "They're not going to put me in someone's headquarters to wait until you need me. They're going to put me on someone's front line as the unit sharpshooter." 

Peggy told him to wait and they'd see what they could do, but nobody argued when he started spending extra time outside training. He was, he thought, as physically prepared as he could be -- and a lot better prepared than most of the guys who'd already gone had been when they'd shipped out. And that, he'd pointed out and Peggy had agreed, was going to be part of the problem, too. He was in tremendous physical condition and with little effort could far surpass what could plausibly pass as a 'normal' man no matter how well-trained. He could break world records running (swimming, too, if he were better at it). If he was going to be sent out with an infantry platoon, the most likely scenario, it wouldn't take long before there were rumors of a new super-soldier in uniform and, once someone with a good memory saw the name, there were going to be an awful lot of questions nobody wanted to answer, least of all him. 

"It's going to be like Benning all over again," he said. "Are you going to be able to yank me out when too many people get curious?" 

"The hope is that you won't be there long enough for anyone to get curious," Peggy responded, then grimaced because she knew how things worked. "But yes, we can and we will yank you out if it starts looking hinky. Even if we have to do it with a Red Cross message." 

The presumptive subjects of those fictitious Red Cross messages were not handling his imminent departure with much aplomb. His parents were upset, although less than surprised -- they'd thought he'd been fooling himself when he'd said he wouldn't be going to Korea. The kids were scared, in part because Molly was scared, and the arrival of their semi-mythical Nana Raney was only a temporary distraction. 

After years of being the recipient of congratulations for having his in-laws on the other side of the ocean, Bucky found that he actually liked his mother-in-law, who was far more jolly than shrewish and considered three grandchildren acceptable compensation for keeping her only daughter so far from home and the sea. (A sentiment that made Molly roll her eyes because she hated fish, hated fishing boats, and if New York City hadn't panned out, she'd have gone to Dublin instead because she'd sworn at age ten to never be a fisherman's wife.) Ma Raney had liked it better when her daughter had been married to a railroad man than to a soldier, but she didn't hold it against him. Instead, she insisted he take Molly out on the first Saturday night she was there and had left the _Irish Echo_ open to the dance hall listings when he'd hedged. 

There were dozens of Irish-American halls and societies in the city and had been for decades; he'd been going to one or another since he'd been in short pants because his parents might've both been born here, but that was probably the only cultural tie to The Old Country -- along with corned beef and Catholicism -- that they'd clung to tightly. Most of his and Molly's dates back when they'd been courting had been to Irish dances; it had been familiar and low-pressure and not too expensive. Tonight, however, he could afford better than the Emerald Society's offerings and he took Molly to City Center, which had two orchestras alternating sets of modern pop standards and ceili tunes. They'd dressed up, boggling their children, and stayed out late because they didn't have to run home because the sitter needed to leave. There'd been a nice dinner and champagne that even if it didn't affect him anymore, made Molly just tiddly enough to forget what waited for them at home and in the future and be able to enjoy the now. In a few weeks, he'd be too busy to worry, but worry would be all she'd have once he'd left. 

In the small hours, they walked back down to the train, her arm in his and her head on his shoulder, and he was grateful and in love and completely terrified. 

His last week at home was hectic and stressful, made worse for it being Holy Week and there being church obligations and family obligations and what were they bringing down to his folks for Easter and of course we'll include you in our prayers. Easter dinner would be the last chance for everyone to see him before he left for Lehigh on Tuesday and what should have been a loud and fun occasion highlighted by children with too much sugar was turning into something far heavier. His parents had sent him off to war once before and in return had gotten a "regret to inform" telegram about his going missing/presumed captured -- HYDRA had never let the Red Cross in to see who was in the camp. Steve had, thank God, stopped them from sending the one that he was now presumed killed, but now they knew there was a chance they could be getting one once more and it weighed them all down. It was hard to be around that much fear and sadness; he didn't believe in jinxes or anything of the sort, but it was like they were already preparing themselves for the blow and he wasn't dead yet. 

But he might be, so in between everything, he found a few quiet moments to make sure his affairs were in order, that his will and the insurance and mortgage and other information was up to date and findable, that Molly would be fine handling all of the household business that he usually did, that if the worst should happen, she'd be okay even if Stark didn't keep his word. (He knew Stark would.) He'd written death letters, to Molly and to his parents and to each of his children for when they were adults, explaining why he'd done what he'd done and that he'd loved them all and please don't blame Steve, who might very well turn out to be his killer, but who was really just a victim in all this. 

Going to war in '42 had been a lot easier and not just because he'd been a dumb fool who hadn't understood what he'd signed up for. 

From Jersey to California to Japan to Korea took the better part of four days not bothering to count the time zone changes. He'd been in the Army's care since they'd dropped him off at Fort Dix with his orders tucked into his pocket; as expected, he was was going directly into action with an infantry unit, albeit as part of a sniper team. The Army let him carry Stark's rifle instead of requiring standard issue; he wouldn't be the only guy down range fielding one of the weapons currently under consideration by the Infantry Board. 

"Pretty small favor considering they're sending you right up Pork Chop Hill," the sergeant in charge of sorting new arrivals in Pusan told him once he saw the orders for the 17th. 

He didn't know what sniper teams were supposed to look like nowadays, but the 17th had just gotten creamed pushing the Chinese off of Pork Chop Hill and so his was five guys including him, one other shooter (Jefferson) and three guys (Braun, Leftakis, and Wyman) to pretty much do everything else from spotting to radios to keeping the shooters from getting shot in the back. They were attached to Company B and, by virtue of rank, Bucky was in charge of their team despite not even having a full day in country. It was what happened all the time, but he didn't know them, nor they him, and until that changed and he got his bearings, it was going to be rough. He was wet behind the ears for this war, no matter that he'd done time in the last one, and they had just been through a couple of weeks of sheer hell after what had already been a long war; their bond with each other was iron-clad, but him they had no reason to trust. He recognized the emotions from his own war -- his first war, this one was his now, too -- but that didn't mean he could do anything about it except not screw up.

Accordingly, he spent his first days learning names and faces and maps and radio call signs and trying to take the measure of his immediate CO and NCOIC, neither of whom paid him too much attention because he'd been one of a dozen new arrivals and most of them required more effort than a staff sergeant. He was busy enough to not think about Steve, about SHIELD, about what he was really in Korea to do because if he didn't survive _this_ , if his men didn't survive this, it wouldn't matter. What he'd learned the first time in uniform helped a lot, as did the refresher training at Fort Jackson, but knowing what to do and then being able to instinctively put it to use was something else -- and something he'd need to come back fast. He'd made the transition at Benning and then at Jackson and then at Lehigh, but that had been _practice_ and there'd been no fear behind it, not the way there was here. He knew he was well-trained, but being able to have faith in that training again would take some time, at least until his first time out and, hopefully, safely back again. 

His first time out was less a patrol than an overwatch, setting up shop to stop the Chinese from picking off the guys who were moving around the field. The battle was over in the sense that the armies weren't going at each other in numbers the way they had for the last few weeks, but it was still going on in every other way that mattered, including the kinds that caused plenty of casualties. The bunkers that should have been empty sometimes weren't, the odd round of artillery screamed overhead, and machine gun fire ripped through fortifications that had been deemed low-priority repairs because they were supposed to have been safe. The 7th was trying to put the defenses back together -- everyone knew the Chinese were going to try again for real -- and the Chinese were doing their best to make sure that didn't go easily. 

His first kill was a Chinese soldier belly-crawling out of a tunnel nobody had even realized was there. He had grenades and a rifle strapped to his back as he moved under and around debris and dry brush that hadn't burned, which was possibly why the tunnel had been undiscovered. Leftakis saw him through his binos and asked Bucky if they should call it in. Bucky followed Lefty's gaze until he found the guy, who looked to be alone but possibly wasn't. It was maybe 1200 yards away, easy winds, and no friendlies near enough to accidentally get in the way. He breathed in and out once and then again, pulling the trigger on the second exhale. 

"Got 'im," Lefty confirmed with a touch of approval in his voice. "You want me to call it in now or you figure they'll follow the noise?" 

"Call it in so they know to bring the flamethrowers," Bucky replied, shifting back to his original position. He and Jefferson had split up their sector between them and he'd settled in earlier at a point that allowed him to be relatively comfortable and still get a shot off without moving too much. "Could be just a crazy guy out for glory, but odds are he brought friends." 

It turned out to be the only shot he fired that morning, although not the only call Lefty made to warn of enemy movement, but the trip back to camp was noticeable for the lack of tension. He'd passed the biggest test and shown his team that he would at least be part of the solution and not adding to their problems. He'd passed a smaller test for himself, which was how he'd react to being back in the field when his last true action had been climbing off a table in Zola's lab and then the crazy weeklong march from the HYDRA factory back down Italy through to friendly lines. 

Jefferson, the leader of the pack before he'd arrived, suggested they all go directly to the chow hall, looking to Bucky to make sure he understood the offer included him. 

"B-rations, my favorite," Bucky replied with obviously false enthusiasm. Their camp was 'civilized' enough to have tents and showers, but he'd been told that A-rations hadn't been seen since March, although rumor had it that they'd be returning in May. He didn't think anyone would believe that one until there was an actual lettuce leaf produced. 

"I dunno how you went all those years without shit on a shingle, Sarge," Wyman said, shaking his head. "Who needs lobster when you got that?"

After eating, Bucky bid his teammates farewell for a while and went back to his tent to maybe write Molly but mostly to have a few minutes away from the press of people. There was no privacy in the Army, not unless you could carve out a little space in your head where nobody else could bother you and he hadn't been back in it long enough to be able to do that. He was bunking with a couple of SFCs for now, a cot and a locker and a bit of space in a tent that did nothing to hold out the cold, luxury digs as far as the enlisted men went. His roommates, platoon sergeants both also assigned to Company B, were good enough guys who were happy to show him the ropes around camp, including who to avoid as both friend and enemy. The price of that mentorship was gossip, about himself mostly but what he'd heard back in the States was good, too. The outside world, the 'real' world, arrived in Korea on a two-to-three-week delay, depending on the mail. Bucky was new, hence he was news, at least until something more interesting came along. His rifle and gear, especially; everyone wanted a look and a chance to shoot off a few rounds because it was a Stark rifle and everyone assumed it was going to be too good for the Infantry Board to select. (He let some people look and touch, but nobody took it personally when he didn't lend it out for practice rounds.) His own story, he let the rumor mill fill it out because the truth would only cause problems. Peggy had suggested taking a few years off his age if asked; he could pass for being in his late twenties instead of halfway through thirty-five and being that much younger would make his physical prowess that much less noticeable. He let people assume what they wanted as to why he was coming in to the war so late and why he was coming in at all if he was too old to be drafted, but he readily admitted to prior service in the last war because it made guys less nervous about a greenhorn carrying his rank. Fudging with his age changed his war history, made him one of the draft babies rushed through to NCO near the end of the war instead of a guy who'd been twenty-four when he'd enlisted right after Pearl Harbor and had come up the hard way. It made him too young to be Captain America's Sergeant Barnes and hey, there were God-knows how many Barnes in the Army, right? 

After not messing up the first time out, he had been deemed competent and his team eligible for any mission that came up. A lot of what they did was what they'd done, setting themselves above and apart from the main body and surveying the scene and adjusting the odds of everyone else's survival as necessary. It was quiet work except when it wasn't; they weren't the only ones looking down from on high and sometimes they had to chase down what they couldn't see. The Chinese had snipers, too, some of them very good and some of them not very good but extremely well-hidden. There was nothing fun about watching the spot where guys thought they'd seen muzzle flashes, knowing that someone else might have to die before you could do more than fire blindly. It had been a problem back in his first war, in Africa and then in Europe even well after he'd gotten sent home. Nobody had realized how damned _close_ the snipers could get and, with that proximity, how accurate they could be. Here, the Chinese were sneaking in as far as they could and then hiding themselves and it was up to him to catch them and make them pay. 

Years ago, he'd told Steve that being comfortable with killing didn't mean you were a bad man because sometimes a good man had to do just that. Bucky believed himself to be a good man, then and now, but he also believed that he had to do what he must to keep his own men alive and, while standing overwatch on a battlefield, all of the men wearing his uniform were his own. They were someone's sons, something that meant a lot more to him now that he had two of his own back home forgetting what he looked like than it had back the first time. 

The lives he took didn't come without cost -- he'd seen more of the camp chaplain than Molly or Father Murphy would have believed likely -- but it was a weight he could bear more easily than that of those he hadn't been able to save. Than the life, somewhere out here in this strange country, he needed to save most of all but might end up taking. 

As May moved on, the weather got warmer and even wetter than it had been, he got mail from home, and, miracle of miracles, A-rations appeared in the chow tent. In the field, he had graduated from "not gonna get us killed" to being respected, even maybe admired. He understood it even as he thought it was a little ridiculous; he was a good shooter and with enough time back in the soup, his instincts and skills had come back sharp as before. It wasn't anything special, certainly not as special as he was capable of -- and had thus far been able to keep from putting on display too much beyond earning a rep in the chow hall as a guy who squirreled away food for later. There'd been a couple of instances where he'd had to lie his way out of the most obvious explanation for how he'd done what he'd done, feats of strength and speed that had gone unwitnessed except for the results. But there was no such thing as magic and there hadn't been a super-soldier since Cap had gone down in '45, so the next most plausible answer had to be it. In the middle of a war, it didn't matter if you were lucky or if you were good, so long as you kept being both. His team was getting sent out further and further from camp, issued C-rations and not expected back until tomorrow, until two days later, until the mission was accomplished. It was more like Africa, as far as his personal experiences went, where there'd been more climbing things and hiding in rubble and fewer hours spent in trenches and makeshift bunkers than there had been when he'd joined the 107th and gone to Italy. They were hunters here, sheepdogs protecting the flock, and even with only each other for protection, sometimes far from help, it felt good to be the predator instead of just waiting for the next attack. Which was coming, they all knew that even without the reports of the Chinese buildup right behind their lines. 

But the foggy pre-dawn morning when his team returned to camp tired but successful and he was told to go directly to Major Gallivan's tent, he suspected he might not be here to see it. 

The Major was not in his tent. Agent Bolling, Peggy's deputy within Project Revanche, was. Apart from Stark sending rifle parts packed alongside cans of peanuts and other tinned snacks, there hadn't been much contact from SHIELD since he'd arrived in-country, which didn't bother him very much. He didn't need the distraction; he'd figured that when they had something, they'd come for him. As they had. 

"We have the target," Bolling said without preamble or niceties. "He's coming to kill General Ridgway." 

Bucky shook his head, not sure whether to laugh or cry or scream in frustration. " _Ridgway_? He hasn't been in Korea for what, a year? This was all..." he broke off, too angry, too _furious_ to speak. He'd been through all of this, the fighting, the separation from his family, the shit of being back in the Army, the anguish of watching people he knew die, and he hadn't even needed to be in Korea in the first place. He'd put his faith in Peggy and SHIELD to not screw around with him and she had. They had. Ridgway had been the commander in Korea after MacArthur, but he'd finished his tour and moved on to NATO. Clark had been the Allied commander since before Peggy had walked back into his life. 

"He's coming _here_ to kill Ridgway," Bolling explained in a tone that was as close to apologetic as he got. Bolling was an asshole on the best of days, as if he needed to compensate for taking orders from a woman by swinging his dick and hitting everyone else. "Old Iron Tits is taking a victory lap before he goes back home to become Chief of Staff of the Army. Killing Ridgway here would do more damage than killing Clark." 

Bucky walked to the far end of the tent and back, trying to expel the anger so he could listen to what else Bolling had to say. He still wasn't sure this justified how he'd spent the last few months, but there was nothing to be done for it now. He had to focus and that meant he had to calm down. 

As far as a statement murder, it wasn't a bad choice at all. Ridgway was still the more popular general; Clark wasn't hated, but Ridgway had more or less turned things around and earned the troops' gratitude for it. And Ridgway had Eisenhower's friendship as well as his ear; it would have impact on more than just morale. 

"When and where?" he asked once he was in front of Bolling again. 

"Ridgway gets here in three weeks, he'll be here for nine days," Bolling answered. "His itinerary's still being finalized, so while we don't know exactly where he's going to be, neither do the Commies. They're definitely doing it here, though. We've burned an agent getting confirmation."

Bucky looked up at that. Peggy had promised him that she wouldn't throw away his life to save Steve's, but it seemed that she hadn't made that promise to everyone.

"So what happens to me?" 

Bolling made a vague hand gesture to indicate bureaucracy. "We've gotten you assigned to his staff once he's here, but nobody will let us move you until then. You've made yourself too useful here, apparently, and the 17th wouldn't let you go at all until we got enough generals to sign on. You could've made it easier on yourself. Would've made it easier on us."

Bucky made a face. Bolling had spent the last war in the Secret Service rounding up Japanese for internment. He was a bully, not a soldier. 

"If I'd made it easy on myself, I'd be covered in American blood," he answered shortly. "Possibly my own. If you want someone to blame, talk to whoever let the Army put me where they needed me instead of where you wanted me."

Bolling ignored the comment and the tone in which it had been delivered. "We're trying to get the support team added to his security detail, but we may just have to shadow him instead. The Army likes SHIELD, but they trust themselves more than they trust us and even if we tell them that a super-soldier's coming for him, they'll think they can handle it."

He had more to say, but very little of it impacted Bucky in the short term. He had at least two more weeks here in the shadow of Pork Chop Hill, then down to Pusan to meet Ridgway's traveling party. Two more weeks of intense warfare, during which he couldn't let himself think about what came after or else he might not live to see any of it. It would be hard, to know Steve would be so close, might already be in Korea, and to have to put it out of his mind, to not look for Steve's face on every tall blond soldier he saw. 

"Don't get yourself killed," were Bolling's parting words. "It would be a goddamn waste of resources."

His team was loitering along the path that led from Officer Country toward the mess tent; they'd played the odds -- either he was going to go eat or he was going to go shower and sleep and, after more than a month together, they could make an educated guess. 

"Bad news, Sarge?" Lefty asked, making no effort to hide the fact that they'd been waiting for him. "Or rifle stuff?" 

The team knew he sent regular reports back to Stark about the rifle and got things shipped to him on the high-priority official transports instead of slow-boating it with the regular mail. 

"Both, sorta," he answered, since they expected something, even if it weren't the full details. "They'll get back to me, blah blah. Nothing to be done about it now. You guys eat yet?" 

The next two weeks were _hard_. His commanding officers seemed to want to get every single drop of usefulness out of him before they lost him, so his team was drawing new assignments almost as soon as they came back from the last one. They weren't all hard, although some were and a couple were brutal, but it was a long time to be operating at such a pace and they hadn't exactly been lolling around doing nothing before. He did his best to make sure his team was rested and fed and had their wounds tended to (cuts and blisters, mostly, although Braun went through yet another round of trench foot because of all the standing around in the mud), using both his rep as Staff Sergeant Squirrel and the cigarettes from his c-rations to pick up a few extra treats for them from the guys on KP. Stuff he'd been doing all along, really, but with a more concerted effort. Because it was that much harder to concentrate now. He was distracted by what was coming, as much as he knew he needed not to be, as deadly as it could prove to be for not just him. But as hard as it was to master his thoughts when he was awake, at night it was impossible. He didn't dream of Zola's lab now, nor of Korea or of Molly back home with the kids. He dreamed of Steve and every single time it was a nightmare. Every single time one of them died, sometimes him by violence, sometimes Steve by a bullet from his rifle, over and over again. There was never a happy ending. 

The day his transfer orders came, it was with as much dread as relief that he packed his gear to hitch a ride to Pusan. He said goodbye to his roommates and his team, who were less surprised than they possibly should have been that he was moving on so quickly. He wished them well and told them that if they were ever in NYC to look him up. 

Pusan was another planet after a couple of months running around up north and he felt like a country bumpkin visiting the big city for the first time, like he'd somehow managed to forget he'd lived his entire life in New York City. There was ample fresh food and indoor heating and plumbing and he was expected to use all of those things to turn himself into a respectable soldier instead of the wild man his escort, a light bird whose fingernails were too clean, seemed to think he was. Especially if he was supposed to be part of General Ridgway's official detail, there was no way he could be seen with the General, let alone presented to him, looking like he was. 

More concerned with ending the hectoring than what General Ridgway -- not due for another four days -- might think of him, he turned his entire rucksack over to the laundry and set about acquiring boot polish and a haircut and a meal, not in that order. He'd gotten as far as eating before a messenger from SHIELD tracked him down. 

He wasn't worried about what Ridgway might think, but he could admit to a little bit of a vicious thrill at Peggy Carter widening her eyes in surprise when he walked into the hotel room. Whatever he looked like, it was what she'd helped turn him into and she could be shocked at the fruit of her labor. The three men with her, Bolling being one of them, looked startled as well. He didn't know why Bolling should be surprised, but he was. Maybe it was that this was a hotel room in a pretty nice part of town and not the camp XO's tent on the front lines, maybe he looked more like a predator out of his native environment. 

And since when was a warzone his native environment? But the fact of it was that being here, in uniform, felt awkward and wrong. Civilization, with its street lights and paved roads and shop signs, was something from the life he'd packed away into his heart when he'd arrived at Fort Dix back in April. Sergeant Barnes didn't know what to feel carrying his rifle on a street with mothers escorting young children to school instead of fleeing to a refugee camp. 

"We should go over Ridgway's itinerary," Peggy said, recovering herself and gesturing for him to go to the table by the window. He felt her eyes on him as he crossed the room, past the bed, upon which half-opened boxes were piled, and on to the table. The table was covered in maps, a checklist with the itinerary on one side. He recognized most of the names; they were in the southern part of US-controlled territory, stopping well short of Seoul and nowhere near where he'd been. 

They went through each stop in some detail, what the camp was like and who was in residence there, looking at maps and photographs as if any of this would matter. He paid attention, but he couldn't see the point of it. Who cared if there were more Australian soldiers at one stop or if another was a MASH unit or if a third was on the anniversary of some communist victory? He didn't think any of this mattered and said as much when asked, late in the discussion, for his thoughts. It wasn't a popular opinion, but he didn't care. Nothing in their files on The American had even the vaguest whiff of symbolism; the murders had been the messages themselves, not the means of them -- that was just spectacle. 

"Either he's going to be following along looking for a good opportunity or he's going to show up at some point, do his thing regardless of how 'optimal' the location is, and go," he said as he stood up. "No matter what kind of strategizing you do here, it's going to come down to whether I can spot him first. And none of this is going to help with that." 

Peggy and the others stood as well and Bolling looked like he might try to grab him if he tried to walk away. He gave Bolling a dismissive look and the man stood down, took that fractional step backward and Bucky felt a tiny thrill for it. They'd lost their leash and they knew it and he suspected he shouldn't enjoy the power shift as much, but he did. They'd used him too ill for him not to, experiments and tests and taking him from his family and sending him to war without ever having a real plan, a real clear idea for how to use him beyond that they wanted to.

"Where are you going?" Peggy asked. She made it a question, not a demand. More than curiosity, less than an order.

"To sleep," he said. He'd been up since before dawn, had hardly slept all week, and he was exhausted and heartsick and deeply frustrated, all of which made him no good to anyone right now, including himself. He didn't _want_ to enjoy menacing people who annoyed him, no matter how much they deserved it, no matter if they'd done worse to him. It wasn't who he was and that had to stay the same no matter what else they'd turned him into. It was the only way he was going to save Steve. It was the only way he'd be able to live with himself if he couldn't.

"We know where you're billeted," Peggy said and he thought he saw recognition in her eyes. "If we have _useful_ information, we'll know where to find you."

They left him alone for two days, during which he got a haircut and found boot polish and tried to turn himself into someone who could pass as a garrison soldier and not someone on leave from the front. When they did contact him, it was just to remind him that they had his service uniform (pressed and ready) as well as the 'special' ammo from Stark and some other weapons if he wanted them. He didn't, not at this stage; he prayed he didn't have to use any of it, but he'd go into this with what he'd brought with him, which was standard Army issue save for the rifle. He was sure he wouldn't need the service uniform once they got out of Pusan, but he would need it here. God help, him, though, if he had to chase Steve down in gabardine trousers and dress shoes. 

When he was presented to General Ridgway, the General was far less concerned with Bucky's spit-shine than his dog-robbers had been and that was before he realized exactly who had been assigned to protect him. Ridgway knew about the attempt on his life, knew someone who could identify the killer was to be assigned to his detail, but it also turned out that he knew exactly who James Barnes was, too.

"My men weren't very far from the 107th when it got overrun," Ridgway told him when it was just the two of them, everyone else shooed out. "I know who you are, son. I know what happened to you, at least the parts that made the official record. But I'm mighty suspicious what they left out of that report to see you standing here."

Bucky didn't know what to say, although he knew that the truth was probably not going to help. He had gone this far without anyone realizing who he was, who he'd been, and he'd gotten used to being someone else. Being _that_ Sergeant Barnes again was why here was here, but he'd been dreading it for all of the associations that went with it. 

"You look better than the last time I saw you," Ridgway went on, smiling a little when Bucky reacted with surprise. Had he been one of the many who'd swarmed into the camp to see the POWs firsthand and to gladhand with Captain America? If he'd been near the 107th, he probably had. "You don't remember much of that time, I'll imagine, and what you do remember is a bunch of brass swanning around like they'd all thought Captain America was a fine idea and they'd known it all along. I was there to be seen, I will admit, but I was also there to see if your friend had rescued any of my boys. I lost forty-seven men that month and not all of them were found. He brought back two of them and word of two more and I will be forever grateful for that."

Bucky nodded. He didn't remember much, true. The pomp and circumstance and flashbulbs, so many flashbulbs. And being surprised every time Steve came into his eyeshot because it took him a beat every time to realize that that strapping fellow was _Steve_. Steve, whom he'd come halfway across the world to keep from killing a man who remembered him with kindness. 

"They sent you home afterward, didn't they?" Ridgway leaned back in his seat thoughtfully. "You stay out?" 

"Yes, sir," Bucky replied. It would be easy enough to check, if Ridgway's people had his service record to hand, which they undoubtedly did. 

"But you're here and you've been here," Ridgway continued. "My aide says you've been with the 17th. I know why you're here now and I'm sure someone's cooked up a good story why you were up at the tip of the spear. If I asked 'Why you?' would I get a more truthful answer?" 

Bucky grimaced. He couldn't feed Ridgway the same half-truths he'd been giving to the people who'd been asking, to the entourage waiting out in the other room to be summoned back in. Ridgway wasn't an idiot and he might think Bucky had become a spy, but Bucky didn't think so. He thought the General was thinking back to Italy and HYDRA and Captain America and that way lay the truth, but it wasn't a truth he could offer. 

"The work camp in Italy was more than a work camp, sir," he settled on. His own truths could be offered up instead to protect Steve's legacy, if not the man himself. "HYDRA was doing more than just building blasters. I saw more than I should have then and it matters now."

It was a very selective truth, missing most of the details and understating the others, but if you'd heard any inkling about what had really been going on there, and Ridgway must have, then Bucky had just said a lot.

And Ridgway had heard it, loud and clear. His eyes flared wide and he rubbed his face with his hand. When he took his hand away, he looked sad. "I'm sorry, son. God, I'm sorry. And I'm just as sorry that it's brought you back here, to defend an old man." 

Bucky couldn't offer up any of the usual replies, that he was happy to do it, that he was honored, that he was glad something good had come of the experience. None of these were true and he hadn't lied to the General yet. He liked Ridgway and, as much as he didn't like the weight of keeping Ridgway's life safe from The American's savagery, he was a little glad that the target wasn't an asshole who'd never know what sacrifices had been made so that he could continue to be an asshole. But the fact of it was that he wasn't here for Ridgway, that Ridgway was completely incidental to why he was here, and that part of it had to stay with him. 

There was a knock on the door that startled them both and it was one of the aides, telling the General that he was twenty minutes behind schedule and they needed to get across town. Bucky'd come prepared to start his assignment and so when Ridgway looked at him, he nodded. Time to get to work. 

The General -- the General's dog-robbers, more precisely -- kept a tight schedule. They left Pusan early the next morning, the first stop being a camp with mostly Seabees and Marines and Australians and a handful of Colombians and it was a huge transport waypoint, sort of a 'last gas station for 500 miles' kind of place. They got in, the General walked around shaking hands and taking pictures, and Bucky kept his eyes on the crowd. He wasn't the only one; Ridgway had a personal security detail that had greeted Bucky with more curiosity than resentment. But he was the one who knew what the killer looked like and so he wasn't given a regular assignment and had no sector to watch, instead wandered around purposefully and used what the LIRR had taught him about keeping an eye on a crowd all more or less dressed the same. He scanned faces quickly, remembering none of them but still retaining an echo of a head shape or a nose shape or something else particular that let him skip over them a second time even as he'd recognized that they might have moved position. He didn't look at the women, mostly nurses, or the blacks or the Koreans, but didn't look for tall blond men, either. The American could have different hair, could be slouching to hide his height, could be wearing civilian clothes because there was press here. Including one lady reporter who looked very familiar. 

" _The Aberdeen Evening Express_?" Bucky asked Peggy with not a little bit of sarcasm when he circled around to where she was standing with the other reporters, notebook out as Ridgway made his rounds. He'd seen Peggy immediately, but hadn't gone over to her or stopped his scan of the crowd; it made sense for her to be here and press corps was a plausible cover. As he passed by one of the regular detail, however, he'd asked Corporal Shumway who the pretty reporter was. 

"I couldn't very well pick one of the major dailies, now could I?" Peggy replied, eyes still on Ridgway just as Bucky's attention was still on the crowd. From more than a few inches away, it might look like they didn't even realize the other was there. "Their war reporters are all known quantities by now." 

He'd met a few of the more enterprising up north. "This isn't exactly war reporting," he pointed out. 

"Then it's just as well I'm not a real reporter," she shot back cheekily. "How are you doing?" 

He was a little startled by the question. "I'm fine," he said after a moment. "I suspect I'll be fine right up until I see him."

Peggy made a noise that could have been a chuckle or it could have been her swallowing her grief. "Yeah."

He moved on, then, and she jostled forward to get closer and he didn't see her again until the next day because the next stop, a camp with Korean soldiers, wasn't open to the press. 

During the long conversation in Pusan, Bucky had been at odds with Bolling about whether The American was more likely to strike during one of the strolls through a camp or in transit or during the night. Bucky thought it would be during one of the public events to magnify the shock value while Bolling had thought it would be during the night because of the carnage in the two hotel rooms. Bucky won the argument by default -- he was going to be making his own decisions about how to cover Ridgway -- but he still thought he was right. Which didn't mean that he didn't check that Shumway and the others took night guarding seriously, just that he wasn't putting himself in the rotation. 

They moved north at a brisk pace, stopping at two or three camps a day most days, one if the place was big enough. The last stop on the fourth day was a MASH unit, one of the larger ones that was used as a waypoint by the ones further north as it transited the wounded south and home. It had also hosted a company of Korean soldiers until recently; they had moved north right around when Bucky had come south. Ridgway's schedule for the stop was to start with a visit to the hospital space that would be closed to the press, as his more private moments with the troops tended to be, and then he'd do his handshaking thing on the walk from the hospital part of the camp over to the chow hall, where he was supposed to give a short speech.

The bedside visits would take the most time and Bucky considered it low-risk time, as had Bolling and Peggy and the others. No point in killing a man in the best place to save him, although there was someone there with him just in case. Bucky used the opportunity to eat and walk around, get a feel for the place. He liked the way things were set up now far more than the casualty system he'd seen and used back in the last war. He'd seen how it had worked up north where a guy with a shrapnel wound that would have killed him in Italy or Africa ten years ago was expected to survive now. 

The press corps folks, Peggy included, had started arriving; they bummed rides off of whoever could take them, be it the General's entourage or a passing ambulance. He tried to steer clear of them, not wanting to talk about either his purpose or the rifle he'd stopped carrying around after the first time he'd gotten swarmed by reporters asking about it. The rifle Stark had built for him didn't look as foreign as the one he'd put in competition and he'd made sure it was the same color as the Garands and Springfields still running around so that, from a distance, it wasn't completely obvious that he was carrying anything other than standard issue. But the press folks were up close and most of them had noticed and all of them knew about the trials the Infantry Board was running. He still carried it when they were in transit or when he'd be in a position to use it in defense against any enemy and not just The American, but for these meet-and-greet sessions, he had picked out a second sidearm to carry instead. It made him feel a little like an old-west gunslinger, but it was less noticeable and would be more useful. Not that he wanted to use it. 

Only partly out of avoidance, he found himself over by where the Koreans had been quartered, their stripped-bare tents still up in case more visitors arrived. It was a bit like a ghost town, quiet except for the flapping of canvas, at least when there were no helicopters flying in or out because the flattened clearing where they landed carrying casualties was just over the next rise. 

(Helicopters, now that was a thing to see up close. He wouldn't mind a ride in one of those.)

He looked at his watch and realized Ridgway would be finishing up soon, so he made his way back to the hospital. He found the General still inside, talking to a dozen or so doctors and nurses; Ridgway saw him and gave him a subtle nod, but kept his attention on those around him. Bucky hung back, patient and calm and his hand on his sidearm nonetheless. 

He followed Ridgway out at a short distance, letting the General move out with his comet trail of followers in his wake. Soldiers came from nearby bases, sometimes. Or sometimes they were just passing through, like the marines who'd turned up an hour ago in a convoy hoping for dinner and instead found themselves in a dog and pony show. Bucky just watched them as he watched everyone else line up along the worn dirt path and--

His heart skipped a beat to see Steve at the edge of the crowd, but then sped to catch up because it wasn't _Steve_. Even without the hair dyed brown and cut in a style he'd never worn, Bucky would have known that this wasn't Steve. The expression was all wrong, the posture, the _everything_ and Bucky knew this was what he should have expected, but he'd been hoping that there would be something to recognize beyond the familiar features, something to hold on to so he could shake the rest free. But there wasn't. 

He didn't have time to go to Peggy; he had to hope she would notice his actions or his absence. He also had to figure out what the hell he was going to do. Steve -- _The American_ \-- was wearing regular Army duds and the rank of a corporal and looked completely like he belonged where he was. He was lingering a little behind the assembled soldiers like someone more curious than interested in meeting Ridgway would, standing between two tents and half-hidden by the shadow of one of them. He could be just watching or he could be waiting to pounce and so Bucky's first priority had to be to get him away from Ridgway altogether. 

It was easy enough to slip through the assembled soldiers unnoticed, another legacy of sliding through crammed train cars and the mass of humanity that was Penn Station during rush hour. He didn't move toward Steve, though, but instead circled around the long way so he'd approach him from behind. When he got to the top of the 'alley' between the two tents, he paused, watching Steve's silhouette and just letting himself feel all of the rage and grief and horror and _hope_ that had been living in his head and heart for so long. Since he'd found out Steve was The American. Since Peggy Carter had shown up on his front walk last spring. Since they'd declared Steve dead in '48. Since his plane had gone down in '45. Since 1943, the year everything had ended and everything had begun. 

And then he took a deep breath, let it all out slowly, and put everything away because the only way either of them survived this was to start, at least, on even terms. Soldier against soldier. 

"Corporal!" Bucky called out in his best pissed-off NCO voice as he stalked down the alley. Steve took a beat before turning, probably because he didn't immediately remember he was supposed to be a corporal. Bucky forced himself to hide his disappointment, his _grief_ when Steve's so-familiar eyes looked at him with no recognition whatsoever. When the expression he got back was the wary resignation of a man who has been in uniform long enough to appreciate he should've hidden better because he was too junior to say no. The lies made Bucky angry and he used that anger to keep himself from falling apart because this was _hard_ , harder than he had imagined and he'd imagined so much. But seeing Steve, being a little more than an arm's reach away after eight years of thinking he was dead, and not only not being able to bridge that gap, but also know what he might have to do instead... 

"You supposed to be somewhere?" he asked, not making it a question. 

There was only one possible response. "No, sergeant." It was Steve's own voice and it cut Bucky to the quick to hear it. "Just watchin' the General on his parade."

"Then you're coming with me," Bucky replied impatiently. He had to get Steve away from here, away from Ridgway first and foremost, but then also away from witnesses. "I need a pair of hands to move some shit and yours'll do fine."

He spun around and started walking back the way he had come, not turning around to see if Steve was following him because if he had been a regular staff sergeant who'd told a regular corporal to come-with, then he wouldn't need to check to see if said corporal was coming-with. But he could hear Steve's footsteps anyway and exhaled slowly in relief.

He led Steve toward where the Koreans' tents were; it was relatively isolated and, with everyone looking to have chow with the General, there wouldn't be much chance of anyone passing by and seeing what was going on. Not that Bucky had any idea what was going to go on. He could hope that Peggy had noticed his absence by now, that the support team was actually in the camp -- they'd had trouble getting into the country and then getting passes that allowed them to wander around unimpeded and they'd missed more tour stops than they'd hit. He could hope that all he would have to do was stall Steve long enough for the cavalry to arrive, but he suspected that hope was all it would be. 

Whether or not The American thought Bucky had a legitimate purpose for commandeering him, Bucky was still leading him away from his target and his mission and that made him at best an impediment and at worst a threat. He was hyper-aware because of that, focused the way he would be behind his rifle were he carrying it as they moved further from the main part of the camp. His senses had been sharpened first by nature, then by Zola, and then by war, but he still was barely prepared for when Steve (not Steve, _never_ Steve) made his move and grabbed him from behind. 

Bucky twisted out of the hold before Steve could pull him tight, his back to Steve's side, and slash his throat with the knife already in his left hand. Bucky kicked backward, stomping on the side of Steve's knee and forcing Steve to stumble and let him go free.

They were in the middle of a hard-packed dirt road, lit up in the coming dusk by the lights from the lamps hung on high. There was nobody around, no noises but theirs, and this felt like the loneliest spot on earth. 

"Stop, Steve, please stop," Bucky asked -- begged -- because he had to, he _had_ to try to appeal to whatever was left of Steve inside, even if he hadn't been able to see it. "This is not who you are. Steve, _please_."

"I'm not Steve," was the snarled answer. He didn't ask who Steve was and Bucky wondered if this was maybe not the first time he'd been called that. But that wasn't a thought he could dwell on as Steve switched the knife from his left to his right hand and closed in on him. Bucky had a knife of his own and he pulled it out, slashing purposely to keep Steve at a little bit of a distance. At bay, but involved -- and not on the run back to Ridgway. 

"Yes you are, you idiot," Bucky said, sounding desperate to his own ears. "You're Steven Grant Rogers, from Brooklyn, New York. You're thirty-four years old. You're an artist who can draw anything but your feet always look a little funny. You hate cooked carrots, you love the Dodgers, and the first time you tried to smoke, you puked. The second time, too."

"Bullshit," Steve replied and the tone of it made Bucky want to scream because it was so familiar, to hear that word spat out with that kind of indignation. He'd been hearing it all his life and this, Steve arguing against a basic truth everyone else understood to be true and not worth the argument, this was so fundamentally _him_. Forget the doodling, forget his favorite color or favorite artist or whatever else Kasden had asked him about months ago. Cussed stubbornness was going to be the one thing the Soviets hadn't been able to change about him. But this wasn't like believing that Beau James Walker had gotten a raw deal or that Brown's had the best two-bit steak or whatever stand Steve had decided to take now. This was a denial of a far more elemental truth and more dangerous for it.

Tired of the feints, Steve charged and Bucky braced for impact, mindful of the knife but watching Steve's shoulder instead. Steve had reach and strength and undoubtedly skills as well, but Bucky hadn't been nothing before SHIELD and HYDRA and the US Army had gotten their hands on him and that experience counted for something. He'd known how to fight dirty long before he'd put on a uniform and he'd known how to win. 

They came together like football players on the gridiron, but it quickly became more of a wrestling match. Steve was clearly surprised by Bucky's strength and quickness, but novelty could only carry the day for so long and Steve _was_ stronger and more motivated. Or at least less inhibited because Bucky was fighting to subdue and Steve was fighting to kill. 

For now. 

He knew he had to do something fast because if this did come down to a feat of strength, he'd lose and if it came down to a fight for survival, he'd have no choice. For everything else that he'd believed coming in to this meeting that had stopped mattering the minute he saw Steve, one thing had not: Molly and the kids were his reason for living and, in this moment, his reason for not dying. He would not, _could_ not, die for Steve. But at this moment, if it would bring Steve back to himself, he wanted to. 

Pushing up with one leg, he got into a position where he could rock hard enough to shove Steve off of him, gulping air as he scrambled back and to his feet before Steve could set upon him again. 

"You used to be smaller," Bucky said, wiping sweat from his face with the cuff of his shirt. "But you didn't care, you didn't think it made you less of a man. Which is why I never understood why you went and turned yourself into _this_ \-- you didn't think it made you more of a man, either." 

He was saying whatever came into his head in hopes it would penetrate, but also in hope of keeping Steve here, away from Ridgway, until Peggy could make sure he was safe. She must've noticed his absence by now and that it wasn't for a piss break. The protocols they'd come up with had been to first secure Ridgway, then come for Steve, so he had to hope that that's what she'd been doing. If there was really nothing of Steve here besides his artist's hands and his stubborn streak, if what Devere had warned about was true and there was nothing of Steve's memories here and all they would be doing by stopping The American was keeping his body from disgracing his memory, then so be it. If he couldn't save Steve, he would save The American's target. But he wanted to save Steve, wanted it almost more than anything. To see him right here, right in front of him, after so long, it was almost too much. But it couldn't be enough until it was actually Steve and not this man wearing his face. 

"You used to be sickly when you were a kid, but you grew out of it," he continued, dodging another charge by Steve that might've been a deke because Steve recovered so quickly. "Your first kiss was with Lena Immonen and you rated your performance as terrible. So did she, since you two never went on a second date."

Steve growled and the next charge was no feint and Steve wasn't using just the knife. He'd picked up a a broken piece of thick rusted pipe in his left hand and swung it hard enough at Bucky's head that he could hear the whistle of it as it passed over him as he ducked... right into the path of the knife, which slammed into his left side by his elbow. It hit his ribs at the wrong angle to penetrate any further, but it had been jammed in hard enough that it was stuck in the bones for a second before it got yanked out and Bucky stumbled with the force of breaking free. Steve went in for another attack but Bucky, holding his ribs, kicked out a leg and Steve backed off to try for a better angle. 

"Fuck!" Bucky coughed out in pain. "Steve, stop!"

Steve said something in Russian then that Bucky could only half-understand, but he caught the part about Soviet glory and that was enough. "The only _rodina_ you got is Brooklyn, Rogers," he said as he stumbled back, trying to hold the knife and cover his wound with the same hand and failing. He watched Steve, watched his face in case there was some flicker of recognition, watched his body to anticipate the next attack. "You ever think why they're calling you The American? You think you got that accent in _Leningrad_?" 

"Steve!"

Bucky turned to see Peggy standing just outside the shadow thrown by two tents. Alone, which meant that the support team was God knew where. She was holding Captain America's shield and Bucky hoped -- prayed -- that would do something for Steve because right there, in one neat package, were the two things Steve had loved best. 

Steve froze for a moment and Bucky saw something on his face that maybe wasn't recognition but was definitely _something_. Maybe distress or at least something he didn't like, and Bucky hoped that this had done it, had knocked something loose in that brain of his. Steve had sold himself into servitude for Bucky, but Peggy had been the love of his life and whatever Bucky thought about her then or now, he'd never resent her for that. If she turned out to be the one who got Steve to remember himself, he wouldn't ever begrudge her for dragging him through this hell to get here, to this point. 

But the stressed look on Steve's face disappeared as he turned away from Peggy and the glare he threw Bucky as he charged at him, knife poised, was colder than ice. Bucky spun out of the way -- Steve still hadn't quite adjusted to his opponent's enhanced reflexes -- and started running straight toward Peggy because he'd seen Steve reaching for his pistol. With his back to Steve, he had to watch Peggy's responses to guide his own. She stood there, eyes and posture firm in resolution as she braced herself to use the shield and he didn't know if Steve was aiming at his back or at Peggy but he hoped to get both of them behind the shield before Steve fired. 

He didn't. He felt the pain in his left shoulder after he heard the bullet pinged dully off the shield, not bothering to look at his wound as he reached Peggy, grabbing the shield from her with one hand and pulling her behind him with the other. 

"Is Ridgway safe?" he asked, watching Steve watch them with murder in his eyes. He adjusted his hold on the shield, sliding his arm into the straps, which were new and stiff, the old ones worn soft by Steve before they'd been ruined by the long soak in the Black Sea. He hadn't known Peggy had brought it; if he had, he might have asked to practice throwing it. 

"For now," she replied and he could hear how much this was affecting her even though her voice was calm. He could feel her hand on his wounded shoulder for a moment and spared a look; it was a graze, enough to make a mess and hurt a lot, but nothing he couldn't work through. "But he's still in the camp. He doesn't understand that a tent full of armed men won't save him." 

Steve fired off a pair of rounds -- one at center mass of the shield, one at Bucky's head, both clearly testing the shield and its bearer. Bucky was surprised at how the vibranium really did absorb almost all of the impact. But the shield was still attached to his left arm and every movement of it made his rib injury worse and shot pain up into his wounded shoulder like fire. He was bleeding freely; between the shoulder and the side, his uniform was half darkened with blood. 

Steve was still watching them speculatively and this wasn't going to last; either he was going to make a move at them or he was going to run after Ridgway -- or run away entirely and then they'd never see him again. 

"Agent Carter, I need you to go," Bucky told Peggy and he could hear her start to protest. So he cut her off with the truth. "Please. I can't protect you from him and live." 

He wasn't sure he could continue the fight in any capacity and live, but he couldn't let Steve kill Peggy. 

He heard a sharp intake of breath and what might've been a sigh or a cry or both. 

"Get Ridgway out of here," Bucky went on. "I'll do what I can." 

He felt her hand on his uninjured shoulder, a quick squeeze, and then nothing. He charged Steve then, leading with the shield, to keep him from either firing at or chasing Peggy, whom Steve had to know was running off to complicate his mission. Bucky had the strength to throw the shield, if not as dramatically as Steve had in the newsreels, but he didn't dare now because he didn't have the sense of angles and physics to make sure it came back to him. Instead, he charged like he was a centurion armed with nothing but his shield and his honor and the cruelty of the fucked-up gods who'd sent two brothers against each other. 

Steve emptied the pistol shooting at him, but the shield took all of it and Bucky heard the shots more than he felt the impact of them. He felt the impact of his feet on the dirt, though, in his ribs and up his arm into his shoulder. 

"Didn't think 'until the end of the line' would go like this, did you?" he asked Steve as they collided, his momentum driving Steve to the ground on his back with Bucky straddling him. Bucky backhanded him with the shield, feeling the sharp pain in his side scream to new levels. "It's okay. I didn't think I was fortune-telling the future when I used to say to you that you'd be the death of me, either. But here we both are." 

He bashed Steve in the head again, dazing him, and tried it a third time, but Steve grabbed the shield at the bottom and it was only because it was strapped to Bucky's arm that he kept it, although the sharp motion makes him shout out in pain as he felt his wounds tearing further open. His view of Steve's hands was partially blocked by the shield, so he didn't see Steve pull free a knife and stab him in the left thigh. 

Ignoring the pain that set his leg afire even as he shouted with it, he reached for the knife to pull it free and throw it far away so that Steve couldn't use it to stab him somewhere else. But the motion put him off-balance and Steve bucked up and threw him off to the side, the shield cutting into him from chin to waist as he landed awkwardly on it before rolling off. He forced himself to scrabble to his feet, bloody and aching and exhausted. He still had his knife and his pistols and he was increasingly sure that he would have to use one of the latter. He could shoot to wound, he hoped. But he might have to shoot to kill if Steve got him again. All of his wounds were on his left side, shoulder, ribs, and thigh, and he could not stand too many more and be any better than a wounded gazelle in a race with a lion. If he wasn't already; he could stand on the thigh for now, but not indefinitely. His body throbbed, a steady burn of pain. But his heart hurt worse. 

Back when they'd been discussing what could happen when (if) Bucky finally did run into Steve, the SHIELD geniuses had been woefully short of useful answers for what to do about his mind. Brainwashing was a common enough topic -- hell, the _Post_ even ran a feature on the Communists kidnapping vulnerable youth and turning them into Soviet agents who didn't even know that they were Soviet agents. But there wasn't actually a lot of practical research on the matter. Most of the time the Red Scares were just scares and in the few cases of young men and women kidnapped out of cults, getting them right in the head had taken months, if not years. Bucky didn't have months. He had minutes. 

"What kind of a headscrew did they put on you, Steve?" he asked. He barely raised his voice above normal speaking volume, not having the energy to waste. Steve, now holding another knife he'd secreted somewhere on his person, would still be able to hear him. "To go from becoming Captain America because you couldn't stand to let other people fight off the bad guys without you to _becoming_ a bad guy? How did they get you to believe that you were the kind of person who _tore someone's head off_? Did you lose you memory in the crash? How badly hurt were you that they could fill your head with lies and you went along with it? You never go along with anything, Steve. That's your thing. You are stubborn and it is your greatest strength even if it makes even your friends and family want to throttle you." 

"I don't know what the fuck you're talking about," Steve growled and Bucky was more relieved than hopeful that Steve was standing here arguing with him instead of running off or trying to kill him. The longer they stood there, the more he recovered. He was wounded and that wasn't going to heal and there was going to be a point, soon, where it was going to matter quite a bit more than it did at the moment, but he had his wind back and felt stronger for the rest, however brief. "I'm not your friend or your family." 

Bucky laughed, which seemed to piss Steve off more. 

"You are and you always will be, you dumb sonuvabitch. I've know you your whole life and I'm not likely to forget it, even if you have," he said and his voice broke on the last word and it came out shattered. He was losing the physical battle, but he was losing the battle for Steve's heart and mind and that hurt worse than his wounds. Steve was right there and he couldn't reach him. "You gave up so much to save me and here we are, you taking all that back. Or maybe me giving it back. I did, you know. I sold myself to the same people you did and for the same reason. To protect the ones we love most in the world. I did it without a second thought and Molly said I had to forgive you because of it. And I did, even after I found out just how much you've been paying for your good intentions. Jesus God, Steve, I want you to _stop paying_ for trying to protect me." 

"I'm not--"

"You are and fuck what your masters at Moscow Center told you," Bucky cut him off, furious at how Steve could believe lying strangers over him, his own brother in all but blood. "You're here because ten years ago, you sold yourself to keep me safe. You're here because of _me_. And now I'm here because of you. We are supposed to be on the same side, Steve. We have never not been on the same side, not since that first stickball game. Not since the first bloody nose. How can you not remember any of your life?"

Steve looked angry, as he had all along, but there was a furrow between his brows that Bucky recognized from the real Steve, the one who'd go to such lengths to avoid admitting he was less than sure of himself. He wondered if The American had ever questioned his own story, questioned what his masters had told him about his life. 

"Your Ma's name was Sarah," Bucky said, shifting the shield so that he could hide that he was reaching for where his knife sheath had slid in the tussling; he'd put the knife away when he'd charged Steve. Steve wouldn't miss the motion if he was paying attention, but maybe Bucky could distract him enough to count. "She was a nurse at Kings County Hospital, raised you all by herself after your Da died. She was blonde, like you really are without the dye, and she had a beautiful voice. Her voice was the first thing I thought of when I heard Molly speak for the first time -- I looked to see who was talking because she sounded so much like your Ma, just with more of an accent. You heard it, too, when you met Molly, and the two of you ended up talking about County Sligo like it was a place you were going to go to after the war ended to see if any of your Ma's people were still there. That's where your grandparents are, Steve, not Odessa or wherever the hell they told you."

"Shut up!" Steve barked and Bucky chuffed out a laugh because this was what he'd wanted, Steve rattled about his past. He just wished he were in better physical shape to handle the fallout. 

"Your Ma used to sing 'Siúil a Rún' to you when you were sick as a kid," he went on as he worked the sheath around on his belt so it was closer to his right side, easier to reach now that the shield was on his left arm. As close as they were, a knife was probably better than a pistol and Steve was deadlier with a blade than a gun; had been since he'd been Captain America. "You heard it a lot."

He started singing, not loudly because he didn't have a great singing voice and it got worse with volume, but it was loud enough for Steve to hear. Bucky hadn't heard it too often from Sarah. Rogers -- it had been something between mother and son -- but it had been a fixture at every Irish cultural center event he'd been dragged to as a kid. He hadn't thought about it for ages, though, until Molly had started singing it to their children at bedtime once he had started wearing a uniform again. 

Steve's eyes were almost wild now and his hands were flexing and bunching and Bucky took his hand off the knife handle and put it back on the shield because he'd need the extra strength to support his wounded arm. Steve charged, shouting angrily, and bowled him over. They fell, Steve on top and the shield between them and Steve started pummeling him. Bucky's left arm was trapped under the shield and the weight of Steve leaning on it and the tightness of the straps made it impossible to work his arm free. He had to do what he could with his right hand, his dominant hand and his only uninjured arm, but Steve was punching with his left hand and holding the knife in his right and that meant Bucky had to work across his body to defend against the knife. He got slashed in the forearm and on the face before he could work the shield free from under Steve and bring it up sharply, bringing it up against Steve's front to his throat like a razor on a strop. It held Steve far enough away for him not to be able to reach Bucky with his hands, but Steve was still sitting on his hips and he couldn't get free enough to get his own knife out. 

Finally, Steve grabbed the shield and yanked it until it came free, Bucky screaming in pain first from his wounds and then the force of the pulling, which took his shoulder out of its socket. Steve threw the shield aside with venomous spite and switched the grip of his knife so that he could gut Bucky like a deer. Bucky put all of his energy to rocking to his side to get his knife free and he did, but it was a lost cause and he knew it. His left arm was useless to him, but he fought for his life anyway because he had to, because Peggy might come back with help, because he'd promised Molly he wouldn't die here, because if Steve ever got his mind back, this would kill him the way Schmidt's plane hadn't. 

He was so exhausted and in so much pain that when the knife finally went into his belly, he didn't even feel it. He saw it, though, and it was surreal. He flashed back to Zola's table in Italy ten years ago, the last time he'd been in so much pain and so sure of his own imminent death, to the wounds inflicted in what, in hindsight, had been a test to see if he'd heal from them. He didn't think he healed from this, not without a surgeon nearby. There was one, several, this place was a MASH unit, but he wouldn't see them. Steve was going to kill him quietly and hide his body so nobody found it until it was too late. 

His hand was on Steve's, which in turn was on the knife in his guts. He had enough strength left to grip hard, to keep Steve from moving the knife unless he put some force into it because the angle was bad and Steve was also winded. 

"You want to move that blade, you gotta promise me," Bucky said, his voice raspy and low. "You gotta promise me you're gonna go back to Brooklyn and tell my Ma and Da why you changed your mind. Why you killed me when you'd paid so much to save me. I know you told them what you did even if you wouldn't tell me. And then you gotta go up to Queens and tell the kids who shoulda been your godchildren that Daddy's gonna be an angel. Even if I'm not. Judy's the only one old enough to understand that I'm not coming back; the boys won't. They won't even remember me in a few years. Matty's the same age you were when your Da died and I know you don't remember him 'cept as a photograph. Stevie's maybe started crawling by now... Molly's gonna be pissed, but more with me than with you. I promised her I wouldn't die trying to save you and here I am, bleeding out in the dirt in the middle of fucking nowhere, Korea. The nuns told us we'd meet a bad end if we kept it up and we did. And we are." 

Steve was leaning over him, breathing hard and sweat dripping down on him and even more wild-eyed than before. But he didn't force the knife, not yet. 

"What's it gonna be, Steve?" Bucky asked because talking was easier than holding Steve's hand in place. The world was starting to gray out a little on the edges and he didn't think he could feel his legs anymore, even without two hundred pounds of crazed super-soldier sitting on his thighs. "You always used to complain that I finished when you'd started when you coulda finished just fine. Well, you started this one and if you're gonna finish it, you're gonna have to finish it proper. It's up to you." 

He thought Steve's eyes might've been suspiciously bright, but it was hard to tell because at this angle, Steve was backlit by the light from the pole overhead and because his own eyes were full of tears. He didn't want to die, not so young and so far away from his family, but a part of him had always known that he would. He'd cheated death back at the HYDRA factory, lived when Zola and Schmidt should have killed him with their crazy experiments that had only made him stronger, lived because Steve had pulled the craziest stunt in the history of crazy stunts to rescue him before his luck ran out. He'd had ten years he maybe shouldn't have had and he had to be grateful for that, for having the chance to meet Molly and fall in love, to be a father three times over, to have a family of his own and to know he'd done right by them, at least up until now.

Steve's hand was still on the hilt of the knife under his and looked down at them, covered in blood. He closed his eyes, just for a moment, but it was long enough that he never saw the fist that knocked him out cold. 


	5. 1955

The church was large; it had been a movie theater once and despite the consecration and redecoration, it still had the sense about it that recidivism was not completely off the table. He waited until the priest had started talking before slipping in to a seat in the last pew in the back. There were a lot of people up front, family, friends, the old ladies who went to every event at the church, but there were still several empty rows between him and the next person. Which was how it had to be. Too many of them would recognize him, even with the dark hair and spectacles and hunched over posture that wouldn't hide him from the people he'd once considered family. Who would still consider him family were he to walk into their open arms. But he couldn't, not only for the blood on his hands, for _Bucky's_ blood on his hands, but also because he carried more than the taint of brimstone with him since he'd escaped hell. 

The Russians were looking for him, still. Peggy wasn't sure what kind of a threat that really was, though; it wasn't like the KGB -- new name, same methods -- didn't know how to draw him out if they'd wanted. Most of the people he'd gladly die for were sitting in the pews in front of him. Peggy wasn't pushing him too hard to do anything, too happy to have him back to want to fight, but he knew she thought him a little cowardly for not making contact. "I'm sure Molly Barnes has gotten over the worst of her ire by now."

Peggy was probably right, on all counts, although he knew that Molly had been far angrier at Peggy than at him. Even from a distance, seeing the Barnes clan for the first time in ten years made his chest ache with longing. George and Winifred, older but still hale; Charlie, who'd been a teenager at last meeting, was now a man; Dottie and Helen both looked beautiful; even Great-Uncle Henry was there, a little more frail but still sharp as a tack and if anyone was going to turn around and ask in a too-loud voice why Steve was sitting all the way in the back, it would be him. 

Up front, by the font, little Kathleen Mary Barnes accepted baptism with ill humor, letting her displeasure be known as she lay bawling in the arms of her godmother Helen. Next to them, Molly watched the proceedings with a not-quite-dry eye while Bucky looked proud and bemused, like he was rating young Kathy's squalling against the protests previously lodged by her three older siblings, currently crammed into the front pew between their grandparents and showing little interest in the proceedings.

Seeing Bucky with his family, with his _children_ made tears well in his eyes. This was why he'd made his deal with the SSR, why he'd never regretted a single moment of anything he'd done to get Bucky home and away from the reminders of the hell he'd been in. This was who Bucky was supposed to be, this was the life he was supposed to have, and Steve forced himself to focus on that, on what Bucky had, and not on what he'd almost lost. On what he'd had nearly taken from him. 

He hadn't really been back in his own head yet when he'd carried Bucky, knife still in his guts, to the MASH's surgery. He hadn't known who he was, who Bucky had been, but he'd seen flashes, glimpses of memories, and they'd all screamed at him to save the man bleeding out in the middle of the dirt road at the edge of the camp. Bucky had been in the care of two surgeons not five minutes later and it had still nearly been too late. Would have been too late for anyone not cursed with the super-soldier serum in their veins, but he only knew that now. Then, he'd fled as soon as the doctors and nurses had taken over, stripping off his blood-soaked uniform and slipping into the darkness. Away from his masters and his past both. 

He'd kept free of his masters for two years now and intended to keep things that way, but his past... now he needed it to heal. 

Up front, the priest spoke about states of grace and Steve thought that this would be as close as he got. He'd done incomprehensible things, unbelievable things that he had to believe because he had the memories of them and, unlike the memories of his 'life' as a hero of the Soviet Union, these hadn't faded as his true self had re-emerged. He woke up screaming more nights than not, ran himself to exhaustion in failed attempts to flee his memories, and scrubbed his skin raw to wash blood off of hands that would never be clean. He understood, intellectually, that he wasn't to blame for what he'd done, that he'd been drugged and tortured and he'd never in a million years blame anyone else for what they'd done after going through what he'd been through. But that didn't stop the nightmares or the feeling that somehow he should have been able to break free of the Soviet conditioning. Sometimes he wondered if he really ever had, if he ever could be free of Department X or whether their marks went too deep. 

Feeling eyes on him, he looked up to find Bucky watching him. Bucky looked shocked and pleased and pained, but in a good way. When Steve met his eyes, he nearly laughed because Bucky was giving him the 'stay right where you are Rogers, I'll be there in a second to bail your ass out of trouble' look he'd been giving Steve since primary school. And _God_ , did Steve want to believe that Bucky could save him from his pain, the way Bucky had already saved him from so much, at such a cost. But he wasn't ready to have that conversation yet, so when the congregation rose as part of the service, he used the cover to slip away. The last thing he'd seen was Bucky looking frustrated but resigned, a look he was very familiar with, too. 

He left the gift for Kathleen behind him on the pew. 

"Did it do what you'd hoped?" Peggy asked him as she joined him in the study of Howard's Manhattan mansion. Howard was in California, but he'd given them the run of the place for the visit to New York. She'd been in one of the rooms with a telephone when he'd gotten back; she was working while they were here, on some things he knew about and others he didn't ask. The years had hardened her and it hurt him to see it, the way grief and war -- a different war, not a shooting war -- had rubbed away the softness and the hope and left behind the sharp angles and steel. He accepted his own measure of blame for it, for not only making things worse but also for not being there to balance, to dull her sharp edges and remind her to live for herself as well as serve others. That was what he tried to do now, what they tried to do for each other. It was hard work on both accounts. 

"What I hoped? No," he answered, holding out his hand for hers as she joined him on the couch. Every time she touched him, it was a blessing. It was a little prick of light in the darkness that still overwhelmed him. He squeezed her hand as he pulled her over so that she she sprawled inelegantly across his thigh. "But I'd hoped for ridiculous things. You can do that when you go into a church -- ask for miracles and wonders and all that magical stuff."

Peggy made a noise that clearly communicated that she knew he was stalling on answering the question. 

"It was good," he admitted. "To see everyone. To see Bucky healthy. It was a couple more bricks I get to put on the wall."

The wall between Steve Rogers, whoever that turned out to be now, and The American. 

Peggy brought their joined hands to her lips and kissed the back of his palm, leaving a faint lipstick impression behind. "You'd put a lot more bricks on that wall if you'd let them back into your life."

It was his turn to make a vague noise that was nonetheless easily translatable.

Peggy arranged herself into a more comfortable drape over him and they sat there, just enjoying the quiet and the contact, for he didn't know how long. They didn't see each other as often as either of them would like; Peggy was based in DC still and he split his time between Texas and wherever he got sent on his unofficial missions for SHIELD. His assignments were a hodge-podge of surveillance and sabotage, using what the Soviets had let him see against them. SHIELD had asked him to menace, but they hadn't asked him to kill, at least not yet. He didn't know what he'd do if they did; he appreciated in a way he hadn't before how a single well-chosen murder could completely change the course of events, but he hadn't murdered anyone as Steve Rogers and that was a bridge to his old life he did not want to have to burn down because he didn't have that many left. He'd killed plenty as Captain America and his conscience was clean on those deaths, as much as he regretted the necessity of them. He'd take a life if he had to, but he wasn't sure that he really had to. Even a well-selected murder would likely still be useful instead of necessary and allowing himself to cross that line for the sake of convenience, he felt, would be a betrayal of Abraham Erskine's faith in a way nothing he'd done so far had been. 

But that remained a question for the future, a theoretical that might never become actual. Especially if he told SHIELD that he didn't want to work for them anymore, something he considered doing more and more. He wanted the people who'd turned him into the American to pay for what they'd done, but he didn't necessarily think he had to be the person to mete out that justice. He wasn't sure going back into the field was doing him any good; it wasn't making him sleep any easier having The American so close to the surface, that was for certain. It wasn't making it easier to find Steve Rogers. 

Right now, though, he could find Steve easily enough with Peggy half in his lap, her breath even and steady, and he closed his eyes and just enjoyed the feel of her body against his. He had spent his entire time under Soviet control without anyone touching him in kindness, without him touching anyone else except in malice. He'd had to relearn how to accept physical contact, accept physical intimacy, and there were some days when he simply couldn't. When no matter whom he touched or why, he felt only the sense-memory of bone breaking, of muscle tearing, of viscera sliding, and of the slipperiness of blood. He hated when those times came when he was with Peggy because it meant he was wasting time, time he'd gotten back as a gift. Peggy's answer when that happened was to give him a pencil and tell him to draw her.

He'd taken her advice to heart even when they weren't together. He'd filled sketchbooks by now, sometimes pictures of Peggy but sometimes Bucky or various Barneses, sometimes Brooklyn and the people he'd known there, sometimes the Commandos, and sometimes just what was in front of him that day. Spending most of his time on a ranch, he'd drawn a lot of cows. Sometimes he drew his less-welcome memories, what the American had seen and done and remembered. But he tended to tear those pages out and burn them, making them disappear in a way they wouldn't from his mind. 

The clock in the hallway chimed the hour and Peggy stirred. "I should get dressed so we can go to dinner," she said, not yet moving to rise. There were maids in the mansion to keep it up, but the Jarvises had followed Howard to California and so he and Peggy had to dine out if they wanted more than toast and coffee and eggs. 

He grunted agreement; he had to change, too. But neither of them moved for another half-hour. Finally they went upstairs to change -- him to dress down a little, her to dress up -- and headed out to walk up to Yorkville to a Hungarian restaurant that Peggy had been told about before going back downtown for drinks and music at Jimmy Ryan's. They returned in the small hours, full of goulash and jazz and when he kissed Peggy, he could taste the sweetness of the gin-and-sins she'd been drinking at the club. 

Two days later, Peggy was back down in DC and he was at Penn Station buying a ticket for the train to Oyster Bay.

SHIELD had had people watching after the Barnes family since before Bucky had gone to Korea, Peggy had told him, and they'd kept it up after his return because the risk to them was even more real. The Soviets had come looking and there'd been real fear that they would do more than just look if they thought it would bring Steve out of hiding. Two years later, the concern about an abduction (or worse) was not as acute, but the watchfulness remained and so Steve could easily find out exactly which trains Bucky was going to be working aboard. The Oyster Bay train was not the longest route, but it was in the middle of the day and Bucky had a long layover to include a meal break.

Steve found a seat at the end of the second car and opened up his book. Bucky would be further down the train to be in position to make announcements and monitor the doors and whatever else conductors did when there were other people to take tickets, but he'd walk through the car later on.

Hearing Bucky's voice as he made announcements for the station stops affected him more than he thought it would. Bucky was muting his natural accent to sound more Manhattan neutral and less working-class western Brooklyn, but the tone and timbre of it was still familiar to him when so little of his life was. The moments when he felt like _Steve Rogers_ and not someone who just happened to answer to the name were rare and welcome and painful because of what was outside those moments, when he felt a stranger in his own skin. But he'd known Bucky's voice when he'd known nothing else and hearing it now make him feel present in his body, in his sense of _self_ in a way that so far only being around Peggy had been able to spark. 

Bucky himself came through the car right after Albertson, eyes canvassing the car the minute he stepped into it. There were fourteen other people in the car -- Steve had kept track of each entering and exiting passenger, unable to put his guard down even here. Bucky's eyes went wide when he saw Steve but he didn't otherwise react, finishing his survey before moving through the gently rocking car with practiced ease, calling out that the next stop would be Roslyn. When he got to Steve's seat, he looked at the punched ticket pinned to the seat in front of him, saw the station printed on it, and looked Steve right in the eyes. Steve nodded, the answer to the silent question of whether he intended to stay until his ticket said he would.

At Oyster Bay, Steve waited on the platform as Bucky helped the engineer and crew detach the engine from the rest of the train so it could be loaded on to the turntable. He knew that it had taken Bucky months to recover from his injuries from Korea, that Howard's specialists had been needed as much as the serum to undo the damage Steve's knife had inflicted. But Bucky moved now with easy grace, no sign that the wounds Steve had given him bothered him in any way, and he covered a discreet application of his serum-granted strength to a recalcitrant buckle with jokes about Irish luck and the wisdom of experience. 

Steve had known that Bucky's recovery had been complete because Howard and Peggy had told him, had gone into detail not only about the original wounds, but also about the measures taken to save him by first the Army surgeons and then SHIELD's own doctors and Howard's civilian connections. But seeing it with his own eyes was different and more important than the second-hand explanations. It wouldn't make what he'd done less horrible, wouldn't stop him from dreaming of their fight over and over again, but it would help because now the words had form. Bucky didn't have the swagger of youth anymore, but his motions had a confidence in its place that spoke of more than simple maturity. 

There were plenty of train workers around and once it was clear things were proceeding smoothly, Steve could hear Bucky thanking the others for letting him get out of other tasks, promising to make it up to them, and to be back on time. He slapped a few backs as he made his way from the open yard back to the station, cracking wise, and he got laughs as he passed. Still the same charmer after all.

"Come on," Bucky said once he'd joined Steve on the platform. "Let's go eat."

As if they had only not seen each other in a couple of days, as if it hadn't been a decade. As if time passing was the only issue between them.

Something must've shown on his face because Bucky cocked an eyebrow. "If you try to apologize for Korea, I'm going to slug you. If you want to apologize for staying away for two years, that I'll listen to. But we can eat while you do it." 

Steve made an exasperated noise, unable to accept Bucky's forgiveness without asking for it, without fighting for it, without doing something to _earn_ it besides being the shell of the man he used to know. "It can't be that simple," he said, surprised at how uneven his own voice was. 

"Why not?" Bucky asked, shaking his head. "What part of it do you think you get to take credit for? What part do you expect me to _blame_ you for?" 

Behind them, the noise of the train turnaround spiked and metal hit metal heavily, but it was accompanied by laughter. Bucky looked over his shoulder, then turned back. 

"Well?" he prompted. 

"I still remember the feel of my knife going in," Steve blurted out. "I remember your hand on mine. I remember the look on your face when you knew you were going to die."

The wry smile on Bucky's face fell and he sighed. "Of course you do," he said, the _but I didn't die_ unspoken but clearly said. "You were an elephant before you had the size and hide to match." 

And then he pulled Steve into a fierce hug, holding on. It took Steve a second before he could convince his body that this tight hold wasn't the prelude to violence, before he could relax enough to reciprocate and hold on, too. He was sure Bucky could feel his struggle and then his surrender and Bucky squeezed harder after that. 

"I missed you," Bucky said by his ear. "I missed you so goddamned much. And you are an idiot. You are such an idiot."

Steve wasn't sure if he laughed or sobbed or both.

Bucky broke the embrace and pulled back. "Do not get snot on the uniform. Molly's not mad about Korea, but she'll be cross as hell if she has to wash snot off this jacket again this week," he warned, then gestured with his arm toward the street beyond the station. "There's a diner down there that's good."

Steve let himself be led away from the station, Bucky answering one last shouted greeting as they crossed the street.

It wasn't a busy road and the sky was threatening rain, so they had the sidewalk almost to themselves. 

"Are you back for good?" Bucky asked. 

Steve heard the hopefulness in his voice. 

"No," he replied, shrugging when Bucky looked over at him. "I don't know that I can ever be back for good. It's not just the Russians I don't want finding me." 

Here in New York, he had the greatest risk of being recognized. Not by someone who knew what Captain America had looked like, but by someone who'd known Steve Rogers _before_. He'd lived the first twenty-five years of his life here and he'd had friends and classmates and neighbors and coworkers who'd be able to see past the dyed hair and glasses and the size. And while these were all people who'd known him as Steve, he was still figuring out how to know _himself_ as Steve and he wasn't ready or able to assume the weight of being Captain America again as well. It wasn't the uniform, which he would never put on again and still had trouble looking at in pictures. It was the _legend_ , which had been carefully constructed while he'd still been 'alive' and had taken on mythic proportions since his 'death.' There was no way any man lived up to that, but this man, the man he was now... it was so impossible that the very idea of it terrified him.

"You sure you're not throwing the baby away with the bathwater?" Bucky asked as they turned onto a street with shops and cars and noise. "Cutting yourself off from the parts you need to avoid the parts you don't?" 

He was more surprised than he possibly should have been that Bucky could still read between his lines. But it made him feel good and he smiled. "That's what Peggy thinks I'm doing, but she's not saying it yet," he admitted. "But right now, I need to be safe. I can't... I _can't_ be him. And most of the time, anything I have to do to assure that is worth it."

The rest of the time, it made him feel empty, like he was hollow inside because the Soviets had scooped everything out to put The American in and, now that The American was gone, there was nothing left but a vacuum.

"The people who miss you here miss _you_ ," Bucky said as they paused in front of the diner entrance. "Not him."

Bucky went inside without waiting for an answer, which Steve didn't have. He knew most of his concerns were unjustified, that SHIELD had run a discreet but thorough threat assessment before he'd come to New York last week and they'd deemed it safe not only for a visit, but also to live provided he was smart about it. He knew that now that Bucky knew he was back in control of his faculties and his life, his staying away was hurtful. He also knew that he was depriving himself of far more than Winifred Barnes's roast dinners by staying away from the only family he'd had after his mother had died. But he couldn't shake the _fear_ \-- of being recognized, yes, but also of being retaken by the Soviets or causing someone else to suffer because of him. He wasn't used to living his life guided by fear; it hadn't been part of his makeup as Steve. He'd learned to be afraid as Cap, to be afraid of losing men because of his orders, but he'd also learned to conquer that fear. The American had known nothing of the emotion. But he was afraid now and it was a fear he couldn't shake, couldn't master, couldn't defeat. He wore it badly, but he couldn't make himself fight it, either. Peggy hadn't yet forced the issue and he wasn't sure Bucky would, at least not yet.

He was brave enough to follow Bucky inside, though. They found a booth far from the other customers. It was late for lunch, too early for dinner, and there was room. Steve sat facing the door and Bucky didn't call him on it. 

"If you're not coming back, can I ask where you are calling home?" Bucky asked after they'd given their orders to the waitress, a tough-looking woman old enough to be their mother. 

Steve didn't know if Bucky meant that it might be a secret or that he might not want to tell Bucky and the latter made him shake his head. "I don't call anywhere home," he replied. "But I keep my things at Chester Phillips' ranch outside Amarillo. He's someone familiar enough to feel safe with, but not someone I'd been close enough to for the Soviets to have kept an eye on."

When he'd finally stopped running from his masters and his past and what he'd done to Bucky, he'd found himself in Amarillo because that's where the Colonel -- "call me Chester, dammit, I'm not a colonel anymore" -- was from and where he'd always say that he was going to retire to if Steve and the Commandos didn't drive him to an early grave first. He hadn't even been sure Chester would be there, although he'd known about the firing from the Army because of Izzy. He'd asked around, got directions to the ranch, and had turned up on the front porch half out of his mind with grief and guilt. Chester and Agnes had fed him, put him to bed, and then gotten in contact with Peggy to ask why a man eight years dead had just eaten half a roast and then passed out in their spare bedroom. 

Bucky laughed, waiting for the waitress to leave their sodas and the silverware before speaking. "You live on a _ranch_. With cows and chickens and stuff?" 

Steve smiled. "And horses and dogs and cats," he agreed. "But mostly cows. It's been good for me. The Phillipses have been good for me and to me. Let me get my head on straight, put myself back together piece by piece. I'd tried to lay low on my own, but... I couldn't live with the ghosts of the men I'd been as my only companions. I tried and I ended up with a pistol in my mouth almost every night even though I wasn't sure it would work."

Bucky closed his eyes, but when he opened them up Steve could still see the pain and empathy there. In many ways, Bucky's own captivity had been more brutal than his own, full of intentionally-inflicted pain that Bucky had been aware of while it was happening. Steve's own trauma had come after the fact and while it was that 'after' that pushed him to the edge far more often than he'd like, it wasn't as if he'd had eight years of knowing he was a prisoner before that. He'd spent eight years believed himself to be a Russian man from Chelyabinsk who'd lost his memories after getting blown up pushing the Germans out of Romania. And apart from what they'd made him do, Department X had treated him like a prized instrument to be well maintained. There had been no kindness, but there'd been no abuse, either. 

"So you remember all of it?" It wasn't quite a question, more confirmation. 

He nodded, no need to go into detail about how vividly or how completely. Bucky knew he had a photographic memory, but he didn't know how the serum had changed those memories, making them almost tangible. Reliving The American's crimes was like sitting in a theater watching a play starring himself, far more immediate than seeing Captain America in a newsreel or on the television had been. 

Whatever Bucky was going to say next was held back while the waitress brought their meals, reubens for both of them, extra pickles and cole slaw on the side, and wished them a good lunch.

"You could move out here, you know," Bucky said after they'd eaten in silence for a few minutes. "To the Island. Far enough from the city to be safe and you could still be close to people without having to see them if you didn't want. You could take the train in to see Howard or Peggy or whatever."

Steve pushed a pickle back into place with his thumb; he had missed full sours. He hadn't missed Bucky skipping the Barnes clan on the list of people he might want to see. "You see me mowing a lawn every summer weekend?" 

"You're milking cows on a ranch," Bucky pointed out reasonably. "I think mowing a lawn in the suburbs is a step in the civilized direction."

Steve, mouth full, could only roll his eyes.

"I might move out here," Bucky admitted, shaking his head with bemused disbelief. "We need to find a new place sooner than later and out here's cheaper than Flushing or Bayside. Kathy's in the cradle with us right now, but the crib's going into Judy's room and it'll be like it was with me and Charlie."

Charlie was eight years younger than Bucky, seven than himself, and little Steve and Bucky had made beds out of couch cushions in the living room because baby Charlie's bedtime had been hours earlier and the shared bedroom was off-limits. Later on, being fifteen and sharing a room with a seven-year-old had been no easier and had sent Bucky over to Steve's more than once.

"It's your own fault," Steve said after he'd swallowed, then grinned at Bucky's glare. "A little self-control never hurt anyone."

"Says you," Bucky retorted, but he was smiling. "Molly's free to say no. She's got no qualms about using the word anywhere else."

Talking about normal things, about what they should have been able to talk about all along, felt weird but also right. It was a relief from the earlier weightiness, however necessary it had been, but more than that, it made him feel like a normal man and it let him appreciate Bucky as one, too, and not as someone's victim -- Zola's or his own.

"Thank you for the gift, by the way," Bucky said after another bite of sandwich. "The priest brought it over yesterday."

Steve nodded. He'd left no name on the card, but he'd drawn a tiny elephant instead, knowing Bucky would recognize it.

"You should come by to meet 'em," Bucky went on, wiping a drip of dressing from his hand before it hit his wrist. "They're okay as far as kids go."

But Bucky's eyes were shining with pride and love as he spoke and Steve found himself smiling in return. He'd always imagined Bucky married with lots of kids, even back when he'd been romancing half of the girls in Brooklyn and Manhattan. For himself, when he had been little, he'd figured it would happen eventually; after, there'd only been Peggy. There was still only Peggy, but the future they had together was an unknown thing. They couldn't just settle down now and have kids and he wasn't sure if she would if they could. She loved him, he knew that in his bones and in his heart, but she loved a lot about her life now, too, and they both knew she'd lose it all if she married anyone, let alone him.

"Moving up here," Steve began, not wanting to either commit or refuse to visit Bucky at home. "Maybe it's something I can work toward."

Bucky gave him a look that clearly questioned whether he was talking for the sake of talking, so Steve shook his head. "I'm okay where I am, I'm good, but it's not permanent. It's a respite, not a destination. I don't have a home now, but at some point, I'm going to be ready to want one."

Chester and Agnes weren't ever going to throw him out, but judging by the way they'd reacted when he'd told them he was going to New York, they probably thought it was past time for him to start reaching out to people.

"You already need one," Bucky told him. "Up here with us, out in the middle of nowhere where only the postman can find you, wherever it is. You need to put down a root that says 'Steve Rogers lives here' and water the damned thing until it grows."

It sounded like something George Barnes would say and, Steve wagered, had probably said to Bucky at some point after his return from Italy. Didn't make Bucky any less wise for passing it on.

"You're gonna live a long time, Rogers," Bucky went on and Steve knew by the change in tone that these weren't George's words, weren't the words of a father to a young son in need of guidance. These were the words of one super-soldier to another. "There's going to be plenty of time for loneliness down the line. Grab on to what you have while it's here."

For a second, Steve could see the fear of that loneliness in Bucky's eyes and he knew that there was nothing he could promise that would allay that fear. He didn't bother to make a joke about still having Bucky; it might end up being true, but it wasn't funny now and wouldn't be funny later.

"I'm trying," he assured. "I am." 

They finished their sandwiches and agreed to coffee and peach pie when the waitress came by. 

"Howard said he was ready to go to market with a new sharpshooting rifle," Steve said as he poured cream in his coffee. "You the reason it's got the selector switch in a weird spot?" 

Peggy had told him that Howard had promised Bucky to look after his family should he die in Korea and Howard had taken it upon himself to fulfill the terms of the offer even when Bucky didn't quite die. There'd been a steady paycheck as a "design consultant" for Stark Industries' armory from the beginning; once Bucky had been well enough to sit up in a bed, he'd demanded of Howard to let him do something to earn what he'd been given. Howard had told him that the sniper variant of the SI-24 was shipping in the hundreds despite Stark Industries not getting the Army contract and he'd already earned his pay. But Bucky had his pride and Howard saw a neat solution and so Bucky ended up consulting on a new rifle based on what he'd taken to Korea and that had continued on past Bucky's return to the LIRR. ("I'd pay him five times what he makes on the rails to do this for me full time," Howard had told Steve. "But I know better than to ask.") 

"It's in a less weird spot than it had been," Bucky replied with a sourness that spoke volumes of long arguments past. "I don't know why he moved it in the first place. It was fine where it was." 

There'd been a prototype of the new rifle at the mansion for Steve to look at and it was a strange thing and would probably end up being amazingly expensive and it would still sell because it was designed beautifully for its function and not to be sold as the lowest bidder on a government contract. 

"He also said that you and Molly danced up a storm at his last soirée," Steve added with a smile. Bucky and Howard were probably more colleagues than friends, but Steve had known both men well at one point and he could see how they'd get along: Howard with his grand ideas and Bucky with the NCO's long-suffering sigh of 'here we go again.' That, granted, Bucky had mastered long before he'd gotten his first uniform, entirely because of Steve with a side-helping of Dottie. But Howard had the wealth and power to put his ideas in motion the way Steve and Dottie never had and Steve knew well what kind of strange and exhilarating experience it was to see it happen up close. 

Bucky shrugged, picking out the peaches and leaving the crust. "I don't much care for them, honestly," he admitted. "Swanning around with the great and the good. There's nothing wrong with what I do, but they make me feel like there is. But it was the first one after Molly'd had the baby and she likes them, so..."

A mother and children entered the diner and the bell over the door chimed as they did so and Bucky pulled out his fob watch to check the time. Steve recognized it as the one George had worn when he'd been a conductor. "I gotta get back. Swanson's likely to forget to lock the pin again and the engine'll be halfway to Mineola while we're still in Glen Cove. You coming back with us?" 

Steve shook his head no. "I think I'm going to wander around for a bit, see what's out here." 

"Everything out here has a plaque because, sometime fifty years ago, Teddy Roosevelt touched it," Bucky said with an eyeroll. 

Steve insisted on paying -- it was a modest sum and he had means -- and they left the diner, pausing out front. Bucky watched him and he let himself be inspected, let Bucky look for whatever it was he'd always looked for before assuring himself that Steve would be okay. 

"Well?" Steve asked, because once upon a time he always had. 

Bucky gave him half a smile. "You'll do," he answered, then sobered. "But if you wait another two years, so help me God, Rogers, I will hunt you down. And I know where you'll be and I'll have Howard kit me out and you will never know what hit you." 

Steve nodded and this time, it was he who initiated the hug. 

"I mean it, Steve," Bucky said by his ear. "You send a postcard of a cow pie or whatever it is they have out there. Don't make me wonder if you're still alive."

"I won't," he promised and he meant it. 

With a final nod to each other, Bucky started walking back the way they'd come and Steve went in the other direction, finding out quickly that Bucky hadn't been wrong and everything did seem to tie into Teddy Roosevelt. But it was a nice town, despite the ominous weather, and the park by the railroad station looked out on to the Long Island Sound and, in better weather, it would be nice to sit out with a sketchpad. 

When he got back to Howard's mansion, it was already late -- he'd stopped for dinner in the city after getting off the train -- and he called Peggy. 

"Well?" she prompted right after the hellos. 

"You were right," he said with a smile he knew she'd hear. "As usual." 

Seeing Bucky had been hard, but not hard at all. He'd need a while to accept Bucky's forgiveness, but... It wasn't that he hadn't realized that he'd missed Bucky. Maybe it was that he hadn't focused enough on how good Bucky's presence would feel instead of how bad his absence had. 

A very ladylike snort came down the line. "Of course I was," she told him. "And?"

He didn't know that he wanted a house in a suburb with a lawn to mow. But maybe a place by a forest or a beach, someplace he could set up to be defensible without making it a fortress. Someplace nearer to the people he was more ready to return to than he'd thought. Somewhere where he could build a new life once he'd finished piecing together his old one. 

He took a deep breath before answering. "And not yet, but soon."

**Author's Note:**

> [The series master post on tumblr](http://laporcupina.tumblr.com/post/130888808639/preserved-master-post)


End file.
